A Reckoning

At one, we met at the hut midway between the top and the bottom of the mountain.  The hut had a crummy restaurant and bathrooms and seemed pretty festive.  From here, you could take a tram to the bottom.

"You want to ski down?" Dick queried.

"Is there a Green to the bottom?"

"I think so."

"You think so?  I don't believe I want to take a Blue yet."

Dick went over to look at a map of the mountain runs painted on a big board.  I struggled over to him, still not doing very well at moving across flat terrain.  By the time I got to him, he was pointing.

"Here.  This is Green.  We can take that."

"Sure," I said.  "Let's go."

We skied over to another lift that would take us to where the run dropped off.  I was beginning to enjoy things.  I was definitely better than the six year olds now after only a few runs.  I was pointing my skis down the hill more and more, though a couple of times I hit bumpy parts of the run and fell back on my heels with that premonition of falling in the pit of my gut.

"This is perfect," Dick said.  "We couldn't ask for better conditions."

He was right.  The runs were snowy and groomed and the day was bright blue.

"Here we go," Dick said as we dropped off the lift.  I drifted down the weak slope out of the way and came to a stop.  I was looking at the signs, a Black Diamond and a Blue.  I began wondering if I would be able to take the lift down.

"Funny," I said.

"What?"

"Where's the Green?"

"Over here," he pointed with his pole.  I turned to look and crossed my skis.  I went down quickly.  People were all about.  I thought to pop up, but the toque on my right knee was too much.  It didn't want to bend that much and I could feel the beginning of a tear.  I lay back, but there was no way to straighten my leg.  The pain continued.  "Fuck," I heard myself say.

"Can't you get up?"

"Yea, yea," I said, but I couldn't get my skis under me.  My knee just wouldn't bend that much.  Dick came over and held out his hand.  Jesus Christ, I thought, imagining the comedy other people saw in this.

"Look at that," I heard imagined voices say, "over there.  Did you see that?  The old guy just fell down and started flopping, and he can't get up.  They shouldn't let people come up here if they can't ski.  There should be some sort of licensing or something.  Look.  He's pathetic."

With loathing, I grabbed Dick's hand and almost pulled him over.  Finally, on the second try, I was standing again.  It felt good.

Dick was laughing at me.

"You've got to learn to get up."

"It was my knee.  It won't bend like that."

"You alright?  Can you ski?"

"Yea, let's go," I said, but I wasn't certain.

"It's just over here," Dick said.  I saw the sign.

"Widow's Run?" I spat.

"What?"

"Widow's Run?" I repeated.  Dick looked at the sign.

"Willow."

I looked again.  He was right.  I realized I was getting paranoid.

"No more of that kind of talk," I heard an angry voice whisper, "or I'll have to use the leeches."  I looked around, but there was only Dick, waiting.

"You go first," he said.  Good idea, I thought as I dropped over the lip.

It was an easy run like I'd been doing all day.  Then we came to a place where the trail split in two and I stopped.  Dick glided up.

"You look good.  You want to take the Blue the rest of the way?"

"Let's just take the Green," I said.  "Maybe I'll do a Blue after lunch.

Dick motioned to the right.

"O.K.  Take it easy on this next part.  It looks tricky for a Green.  Just go slow."

I looked down at a steep, narrow slope.  It was bumpy and didn't seem to have ever been groomed.  Uh-oh.  But there was nothing to do, so. . . bam. . . bam. . . boom.  I'd gotten airborne and gone over backwards.  I could feel my knee torquing again.  Dick skied up behind me.

"Get your skis parallel to the mountain and. . . ."

"I know, I know," I puffed.  But I couldn't get up.  Dick tried talking me through it all but I was hurting.

"Just get me up."  He reached over.  Three tries later, I was on my feet.  Dick was talking, but I wasn't listening much.  I wasn't a third of the way down this stretch.  C'mon, c'mon, I told myself and headed down again.  Bam. . . bam. . . boom.  Wash, rinse, spin, repeat.  But this time, I'd dropped a ski. I bent over to get it, but it seemed a long way away.  As I bent, I felt the ligaments and tendons in my right knee resist.  O.K O.K.  I straightened up,  put my boot on the binding, and stepped down, but I didn't feel a click.  I did it again harder, but the ski skirted away.  Cursing, I limped over to where it lay.  Again, Dick was offering suggestions to which I was deaf.  Maybe it was the altitude.  I was breathing like an asthmatic, my heart pounding away.  My vision was fixed at about five inches from my nose.  Again and again I stepped into the fucking binding.

"Knock the snow off your boot.  Get your ski parallel to the mountain.  Make sure your boot is straight.  You're not doing something right.  Is the binding cocked?  Reach down and pull that lever and check.  Something's not right.  Blah blah blah blah blah."  I was just standing now, looking at the sky, huffing and puffing.  I'd always been a good athlete.  Nothing had ever been like this.  What's wrong with me, I kept wondering?  It's come to this.

Finally, with everything I had, I stomped on the fucking ski.  Click.

"I've got it.  Go ahead."

I didn't give a shit any more.  I pointed my skis down the slope and let go.  I'd turn when I got to the good snow.  And then it was easy.

At the bottom, I was exhausted.  I didn't want to talk about it.  Dick said something, and I said, "Let's go to lunch."  My knee was throbbing.  "That was no fucking Green," I yelled.  "No fucking way that was Green."  Dick was already far ahead.

Green

Morning broke clear and cold and fine.  I sat in the lobby with Curtis, the driver who would take us to Park City, waiting for Dick.

"Did they get good snow in the mountains?"

"Oh, yea man.  I had to take a woman up from the airport last night.  It took forever.  The snow was coming down so hard you couldn't see.  There were wrecks all over the place.  The police were everywhere.  That woman. . . she kept freaking out.  We were only going about five miles per hour, then we'd stop.  Once a truck was beside us and she kept screaming she was afraid it would slide into us.  She'd slide over into the opposite seat and go on and on as if I could do something.  It was something."

Good snow.  That meant we would be skiing for sure.  But I was nervous.  I hadn't skied for fifteen years.  Jesus, really?  I wasn't in the best shape.  I wasn't in good shape at all, really.  My left knee hurt all the time so that I could barely limp up a set of stairs.  I kept telling myself it would heal, but it hadn't, and now I thought about what it would do in a fast turn.  It was more than my knee, though.  It was something else.   It was everything.

"Hey," Dick said.  "You ready?"

"Fuck you."

It was Sunday and there was no traffic this early in the morning.  The roads were clear and good.

"I wish we'd have heard from Beth," I said.

"She hasn't returned my email."

Dick had met Beth Raymer a few weeks before and had dinner with her and her friend.  They'd gone out a few times in a group and had been emailing one another.  But Dick, who has begun to fancy himself a writer, sent her a short story he had written, and he hadn't heard from her since.

"Maybe you should send her a mix tape," I said.  "What the fuck were you thinking?"

Her memoir, "Lay the Favorite," had been made into a movie with Bruce Willis, Catherine Zeta Jones, and Vince Vaughn, and it opened the Sundance Festival on Saturday night.  Dick had tried, but he hadn't been able to get tickets.

"Whatever," he said.

I couldn't say much.  This was Dick's trip, really.  He had gotten the room online at Hotels.com.

"I booked it, but it only has one bed.  We can get a roll away, but it's big enough we could probably both sleep in it."

"Get the roll away," I said.  We were both envisioning a Holiday Inn Express with a small balcony, bumping our shins on the metal framing every time we wanted to go to the bathroom.  But it was clear as we drove into the Canyons that this was not the case.

"Wow," Dick said, "they've really done a nice job up here."

Curtis dropped us off at the big wooden entrance.  "Sundial," it said.  I looked up at the slopes just minutes away.

"Holy shit," I said to Dick, grabbing my bags as he paid Curtis.  It was still early morning, too early to check into the room, so we left our bags with the desk and went straight away to rent some gear.  The girl helping me was from Argentina.

"What kind of skis do you need?" she asked.

"What do you mean?"

"What kind of skier are you?"

"Oh. . . I'm terrific," I said, not wanting to embarrass myself in front of someone young and pretty.  At least not yet.  "I haven't skied in fifteen years."

She laughed, went to a big wrack, and came back with a pair of skis.  I looked at them having no idea.  I had been told that skis were different now, shorter with a different shape.  I'd like them, I was told.  They were easier to turn.

"You sure," I said trying not to sound as uncertain as I was.

"We'll see," she said.  She stared into my eyes.  I didn't know whether to be excited or terrified.  I was both.

Dick was already outside when I hobbled out in my plastic boots.

"They have lots of Blues," he said.

"I need a Green.  Come on. . . I haven't skied forever."

"There's a Green up here, to.  Let's go."

I didn't believe him, really.  My friends are like that.  I act tougher than I am, always trying to be a hero.  I get myself into some pretty ugly places doing that.  So when we got to the lift, I asked the boy scanning our tickets, "There is a Green up here, no?"

He didn't look at me like I needed a babysitter, really.  He smiled and said, "Yes."

There was a tiny uphill slope to the chair, and already I was having trouble.  I tried to pole my way up with my skis flat looking like a grunting idiot.  By the time I caught up with Dick, the lift chair had passed.  We'd wait for the next one.  Cold as it was, I was sweating.

"This will be perfect.  The fresh snow is only about six inches deep, but it will slow you down a bit.  You'll be fine."

I looked out over the mountain.  Nothing looked like a Green.  I should have asked if there were Yellows, I thought.

I passed the first test alright, though.  I didn't fall when the chair dumped us out.

"Over here," Dick called.  He was standing by a sign pointing to Green.  I slid over to him and he began giving me pointers.  Yea, yea, yea, I thought.  I looked around.  The slope was full of little kids learning how to ski.  I hoped I wouldn't run any of them over.

"See you at the bottom," I said, and pushed off.  And suddenly I was gliding.  I did what the kids did, turning back and forth across the slope in big, wide turns.  Already I could feel the pain in my left knee, but it wasn't debilitating yet.  I got to a place where the hill took a drop and hoped I could stop without falling over.  I hoped I could stop at all.  Dick skied up beside me.

"You look good," he said.

"Yup.  I was kicking six year old ass," I said with mock pride.  "It's O.K.  I'm remembering.  Let's go."

Dick ran the Green with me a second time.

"O.K." I said.  "I'm just going to run this until I can keep my skis pointed down the hill the whole way."

"I'll meet you at the hut at one, then, and we'll ski down for lunch," he said.  "Is that good?"

"Sure, that's fine."

Then I was "alone" on the mountain.  "Green," I thought.  "What a sissy."

Still. . . I'm Smiling

I'm still on a mountain high in spite of "everything."  That has to go in quotes, for it is never "everything." Hell, there is so much that is good, but the rough things steal our attentions.  Mine, I mean.  But not yet.  No. . . no, not yet.  Since I've been home, I've been solitary again.  It is O.K., but it stands in stark contrast to the trip.  I will--I must--do something about that.  But company was easier there.  I'm still trying to figure that out through the narrative that I will soon get back to.  But first, apologies for posting so late.

Yesterday, I went to use a large Epson 44" printer, but started later than I had planned.  Then I printed longer than I intended, but the images were so good, I kept saying to myself, "One more, just one."  I didn't get out until just past early afternoon and then went to the gym.  It was three o'clock by then, and I hadn't eaten.  Both of those things are good, I thought, because I have begun to lose some of the lazy, drunken fat I've gained.  But I was hungry and so went to a favorite outdoor cafe to eat and sit out on the end of the boulevard and watch the slim crowd pass.

After lunch, I had plans, left over plans from vacation.  I would do this, then that, all out of the usual realm of hometown existence.  I had my Leica with me.  I would begin.

But when I got to the car, the battery was dead.  Drats!  So I called AAA.  They would be there in less than an hour, they said.  I was parked in an fairly isolated parking lot and had no jumper cables, so I waited.  An hour went by, then more, the minutes passing through me like sandpaper.  An hour and fifteen minutes into it, I got a call.  A truck was two miles away giving a jump to someone and should be there in less than half an hour.  I waited.  Forty-five minutes went by.  I got a call.  It was from a tow truck operator.  He was on the other side of town and would be there in forty minutes.  I, of course, was livid.  I began calling people at AAA complaining.  Of course the person on the other end of the line was some weekend flunky who could not care less, but I was working out my argument for later, for The Big Guy.

"You are a service," I said.  "You advertise your services.  You will provide help in less than an hour."

"Yes sir, we are doing our best."

"Nope, I said, "you are not.  You are doing your cheapest.  You have too few trucks on the road.  You advertise one thing and provide another horrible version of that.  It is like taking money from people to provide a chicken barbecue, and when they all show up on Sunday to eat, you are cooking one chicken at a time on a small grill.  'Sorry,' you say, 'we're doing our best.  We've just got a lot of customers right now.'"

That was a good one, I thought, but the phone moron making his $10/hr was surely just waving the receiver in the air with a smirk.

"Yes sir.  The best I can do is not to credit your account with this call."

Each Christmas, I get another membership from my mother who was always terrified that my '85 Volvo would leave me stranded.

"Great, pal.  You're a fucking champ."

I knew I had better end the conversation there.

By the time the truck showed up and the new battery was installed, it was dark.  The most beautiful day of the year was over.  I'd missed everything.

Home.  A shower.  It was too late to go to market and come home to cook, so I went to a fish shack up the street that used to be very, very good, but which now was hit or miss.  This time, it was a miss.  But I was up and ready to do something, so I drove up to the boulevard to see.  I stared at the crowds in a few joints wanting to see what I saw last week.  But the crowds had not been there, had not transformed.  It was all the same, miserable conservative dolts with joyless paranoid self-satisfied smiles that were a warning rather than an invitation.  The rigid postures and hair that did not bounce.  Brokers and broker's wives and women who wanted one or somebody who made that good conservative money that you could count on.  Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, I thought.  I'm going home.

There, at least, I could do something creative.  I had plans.  I would work on the billions of photos I still owe, but first, I'd check my email.  And that led to something else.  Finally, it was late.  I wanted to make at least one photo, so I began working.  Somehow, I'd forgotten things, though.  I'd lost my touch.  Struggling for an hour and a half, I finally had. . . a mess.   It was not at all what I wanted or intended.  Oh well.  I sent it anyway to the model, Drug Skinny.

Earlier, I'd taken some herbal sleep aids, but herbs do not have any kick, so I dug out a Xanax that someone had sent.  They were weak ones, he'd said.  O.K., I thought, winding down.

I didn't wake up until nine-thirty this morning.  That was the first time I'd opened my eyes.  I lay there comatose for a long time, my body heavy.  Surely it was the combo, I thought.  Herbs and chemicals with a wine chaser.

But now the sun is shining and the air is crystal clear.  I will take my Leica out for a walk in some part of town I never frequent.  Just to see.  No promises.  I have too many of those yet to keep.  But I am smiling still and my heart is not heavy.  I can't tell you how many good things I still see.  I am still happy.

I didn't intend on such a long explanation.  It was to be brief and then I would get back to the narrative. But that will wait.  I'll write it tonight and post it early tomorrow.  In the meantime, I'll give you this.  It is a photo I did for Drug Skinny's website.  It is nothing I wanted, but I love her enough to do such things for her.  And she sent back the following with a note that said, "hehehehehe."

"My ass," I said.  "Don't be fucking with my work."

But it is a throw away picture for me, and really, I didn't know D.S. could do such things.  She truly makes me giggle.

Glum in Paradise

I called Dick to let him know I'd gotten to town, and he told me to pick up the key at the desk.  He was across the street at the show and would meet me for lunch.  I was sharing a room with a fellow who was a buyer for the store.  I had never met him before and kept thinking, "I'm too old for this shit."  Still. . . a free room is a free room, and it was only for two days.  Besides, I was sure the young fellow I had not met was anxious for my arrival.  He was looking forward to the company, I was certain.

The young woman at the counter was pretty, happy, and friendly.  Mormons.  Utah was full of them.  It's hard to dislike a Mormon.  Their whole culture is a friendly one.  It is a volunteer religion without paid clergy.  Sure, you needed to be as rich as Romney to do the Lord's work without pay, but Mormon's have a creed based on working hard, keeping your nose clean, and helping others. When people in the East think of Mormons, they call up images of compounds and multiple wives and secret marriages.  I'd not met any of those.  What I met were images straight out of '50's television shows like "Leave It to Beaver," and "Father Knows Best."  At night, when we would go out to clubs in Salt Lake, of course, I was curious to find the underside of it all, and I'd ask every girl I met if she was a Mormon.  "Sure," they would always say.  "Show me your underwear," I'd ask in reference to the special Mormon Long Johns they are supposed to wear that were sold at the Mormon Clothing Store.  I found out that I wasn't the first to ask that, of course.

The phone rang.

"You ready?  Meet us on the sidewalk by the side entrance in about five minutes.  I think Bob wants to go to a Chinese place for lunch."

Bob was Dick's brother.  He ran the outdoor store owned by the family.  Dick and Bob were both athletic fellows, though Bob had gotten the typical family of four/father of two boys fat, and he loved to eat.  The next two days would be filled with breakfast buffets, giant lunches, and big steak dinners.  I would have a hard time keeping up.

They were there waiting when I crossed the street, Dick, Bob, and Phil, an outdoor sales rep I'd known from before.  My wife had worked with him for awhile, and I hadn't seen him since.  I realized suddenly what I hadn't thought about before--I'd be dealing with a lot of ghosts.

Nothing much had changed in the ensuing years, it seemed.  Lunch was as it always had been, full of retail talk and witty banter, plenty of appetizers and big portions.  Remember this?  Remember that?  Oh, yea, sure, sure.  Of course.

There hadn't been snow this year, but the skies were heavy.  The ski resorts, Dick said, were about to shut down.  They had insurance policies, he reported, that paid them to close if they didn't have so many inches of snow by a certain date.  Business was bad.  We might end up skiing on rock and ice.  I considered that.  Just my luck, I thought glumly.  Nothing was ever fun any more.  The fun was over, it seemed.  Life had just gotten like that, had been this way for some time.  I realized I had been humming "Send in the Clowns" in my head over and over again.  It was about timing, I thought, and I had lost it.  It was what happened "this late in my career," as the song goes, an inevitable part of living. Fuck it, I thought.  My knees hurt anyway.  I was worried about that, about barreling down the slopes at a hundred miles an hour trying to kick into hard turns.  I said so to Dick.

"Hundred?  You shitting me?  You'll be lucky to do twenty-five."

"Feels like a hundred.  You sure?"

We wandered around the show after lunch, Dick stopping to talk with reps, asking about new lines.  This had always been fun for me.  I was like a "secret shopper."  I had long ago advised Dick and Bob that I knew the store sold real items, but they sold something else, too.  They sold dreams.  I could never walk into the store without envisioning myself climbing Everest or rafting the Bio Bio.  I was a through hiker on the Pacific Crest, a climber at Red Rocks.  I'd see customers fooling with brass lanterns and head lamps.  They'd buy something and take it home.  It was almost as good as going somewhere, one step beyond sitting and dreaming while thumbing through a Patagonia catalog.  Hell, I said, I only climbed mountains so that I could feel legitimate wearing the clothing around town.

But everything at the show looked the same as it had years before.  There didn't seem to be anything new.  The company reps, once kids, were now all older with families and bills and divorces behind them.  There had always been crazy fun before.  Around four o'clock, all the companies began giving away beer, hip liquor from microbreweries.  People began to relax and the music came up.  There were parties that night, big events put on by Marmot or North Face or Patagonia, legendary things that people talked about for years.  At least I did.  I played pool with the world's most famous mountaineering twins, kibitzed with Yvonne Chounard, became friends with dozens of the world's most badass adventurers.  I'd even won the imaginations if not the hearts of the world's two most famous women climbers, the head of Nike advertising, and the then current women's kayaking champion of the world.  We'd sat in fields under skies set on fire by the setting sun at giant barbecues, and once watched Lyle Lovett and His Very Big Band perform magically under a purple desert sky that was suspended in time, somehow, never quite going dark but shinning dimly on and on forever and ever on the most beautiful crowd in the world.

I asked, but there seemed to be nothing like that now.

"Yea," Phil said, "it used to be fun.  The show was an excuse to go biking or climbing or skiing.  Remember that time we all. . . . Now it is business.  Everyone just seems to want to get in and out.  Nobody stays after any more.  It's the economy, I guess."

The economy, sure, but it was something else, too.  The world had gone gray.  It didn't matter how many colors the clothing companies brought out.  They faded too quickly.  People were tired.  Worn out.  Even youth seemed jaded and tinged by it.  This trip, I thought, will not bring to me what I'd hoped for.  I had wasted my money, I despaired.  Useless.

"What's that?" I said to Dick.

I was looking out the windows at the top of the walls in the giant lobby.  I couldn't quite make it out.

"Is that snow?"

And sure enough, it was falling hard, giant flakes drifting down as big as your hand.

"Well, that's good.  That's real good.  It will be falling even harder up the mountain.  We might have gotten some luck."

That's what I needed, I thought.  I need some good luck.  I was tired of walking with ghosts.

Showtime

I tried to pack for days.  I kept trying to figure it out.  What would I need?  My mind, though, was muddled, dug down deep in horse shit and mire.  I had all the cold weather gear I owned strewn about the bedroom floor.  Some of it was twenty years old and useless.  It belonged in a museum.  I had triple thick wool socks.  How did they ever go into my boots, I wondered?  Five pairs.  Six.  Some of the first long underwear ever made by Patagonia.  Old ski gloves from the first days of Gore-Tex.  Thick polypro pants for sitting around a camp fire on cold mountain nights.  I needed to make a trip to my buddy's outdoor store where I had once been something of a figure, a climber. . . an adventurer in the land of temerity.  Now. . . .

Dick and I went a long way back.  When he was in his mid-twenties, we began climbing together.  I took him and another friend to ascend Popocatapetl in Mexico when it was new to us all.  I was experienced.  I'd been there before.

But Dick and I rarely saw one another now.  Months would pass.  The years.  But on Christmas Eve in an elegant bar on the Boulevard, loopy on liquor and the day, we decided to go to Park City and ski.  He was going to the Outdoor Retailers Show in Salt Lake which was always fun.  We would eat big dinners at Spencer's Steak House for Fifty dollar Kobe steaks and Romaine Caesar salads you ate with your fingertips and bottle after bottle of rich red wine.  After that it would just be the two of us in Park City with Hollywood, skiing all day and celebrating with the stars at night.

"I don't think my ski pants fit any more," I said.  "And all I have to ski in is my old mountain climbing jacket."

"Is that the Marmot, the bright orange one?" he asked.

"I think so."

"That's fine.  Here's a cheap pair of pants.  Do you have any long underwear?"

"Sort of."

"What do you mean 'sort of?'"

"Yea, I guess."

"You'll want some ski socks.  They are a little padded in the shins now.  You'll like them.  Do you have polarized sun glasses?"

"I think so.  I still have climbing goggles."

By the time we'd gone through the store, I had my arms full.

And when I got home, the new stuff spread across the floor with everything else.  Shit.  What should I pack?

I stayed home from work the day before we left.  I had to get this done.  I pulled out a big duffel and started to cram things in, but it wouldn't all fit.  At twenty-five dollars a bag, I didn't want two.  I pulled down a big travel suitcase with wheels.  Everything went in nicely.  O.K.  Now we were cooking.  Cameras?  What did I want to take.  I had an image of myself making oddly spectacular pictures worthy of the finest Chelsea galleries.  I had cameras and lenses all over the dining room table.  Then more.  iPod.  Audio Recorder.  Cell phone.  Chargers.  iPad.  Kindle.  More chargers.  MacBook Pro. Cables for three digital cameras.  Some magazines I hadn't gotten around to.  Portable hard drive.  The table was overflowing.  Where was I going to put all this?  I was sweating.  I still had things to do.

I went to work, but when I came home, it was all still there.  I had to prepare dinner.  I was exhausted.  Sick, surely.  But was it real or self-inflicted?  I couldn't face making the decisions.  They would have to make me.  I would decide in the morning.

When the cab came at 5:30, I wasn't ready.  In a panic, I threw some things into a backpack.  That will have to do, I told myself.  I have to go or miss my flight.  I hadn't really slept.  Muzzy, I said goodbye to a cat who knew what the bags meant.  She'd been freaky for days, but now she wouldn't come in.

"I'm leaving," I said.  "In or out?  In or out?"

She knows what that means, and she always goes inside.  This dark morning, however, she wouldn't even say goodbye.  She turned and ran away.

Salt Lake was bruise gray when the plane landed.  I hadn't seen it for fifteen years, I thought.  I really didn't remember much but the restaurants and clubs and the big convention center in the middle of town that held the retailers show.   The last time I was there, a tornado tore the roof off while the show was still going on.  There had been many injuries.  I, however, had gone to the mountains for a demo.  I never got to see the damage.

But my wife did.  She was there.  She was in the building when the tornado hit.  And then something had changed.  Something was rent.  Within months, she had left.

That's another story, but it was what I was thinking about as I waited on the bench outside for the hotel shuttle to arrive.  Welcome Back to Salt Lake.

The Artist Is Present

Holy smokes!  I see Q's been helping while I was away.  But I'm back now.  The Artist is Present.

I don't know what that means, really.  I didn't see the movie.  I may want to retract that statement after I do.

Got home at midnight.  There is much to tell, but I want to do it well, not in a reportorial style but with nuance.  For that, this morning, there is not time.  Eating dinner on my second day in Utah, a key crown came undone.  I tried the usual trick of reattaching it with toothpaste until I got home, but that didn't work, so I ate very slowly.  Still, it came off again and again.  Thusly, I have a dentist's appointment early today to get it reattached.  The upside is that I probably lost weight.  No, I know I did.  And shed ten years, too.  I am a younger, handsomer version of the fellow who went.  I mean the skiing and the high mountain air were good, but something else, too.  I got more play going from my room to breakfast than I've gotten all year here at home.  "Play."  That's Swingers talk, I think.  I'm not sure, but it sounds right.

It won't last long, though.  It is back to the daily grinding and milling at The Factory.  They don't see me as Hollywood so much.  They simply want me making lead out of gold.  It's the New American Dream.  What can I say?  It's a living.

But let's not dwell on that, eh?  Here is some street music I heard in Park City.  Just good fun.

Traveling

I'm packing for Utah with the usual misery and dread and some other inexplicable malady thrown into the mix.  I still have clothing scattered all over the floor.  I must make decisions and throw it all into a bag.  What is wrong with me?  I badly need a handler.  I have become overwhelmingly catatonic.

The digital world's kill off of analog is nearing completion.  Kodak is bankrupt.  Now that I've had Frankencamera--The Liberator--constructed, there will be no film to slide into it.  I need to find new, less expensive tricks.

Here's a picture of the girl for me, someone who knows how to keep all the balls in the air with a smile.  What a person like that couldn't do?

The line will be dead here for the next few days.  I'll ask Q to provide more while I'm away.  I'll try to post from Salt Lake and Park City, but who knows?  And perhaps I will not miss a beat.  It is possible.  Everything/Nothing is.

I'll let you know.

Savage Beauty

So here's a silly shot from Monday night.  I used the new Canon 5D with a TELEPHOTO lens.  I never use telephoto lenses.  I'm a prime guy.  And this was auto focus, auto exposure, auto everything.  I just framed and pushed the button.  I had some raffia in the studio and a bunch of things I've collected on my worldly travels.  Same two strobes I've been using with the Storyville shoot.  Of course, this is not what the image looks like coming out of the camera, but it certainly looked fine.  For anyone wondering, I work this digital image about as long as I work a Polaroid.  There is nothing quick about digital if you are going to do it right .

What does the photo mean?  Nothing.  Nothing at all.  But when I look at it, I think, "Hey, I could do the stuff you see in magazines."  With a stylist, hair and makeup person. . . . ??????????  What do I know of such things.  I just think that I can make pictures.  Maybe any kind.

Besides--what is the purpose of A-R-T?  To educate OR entertain!  Surely somebody is entertained by this.  I can't be the only one.

Soon it will be me, Paris, and what's-her-name, the one who keeps drinking and driving and going to jail, you know, the one Playboy just shot as M.M.  Yes m'am.  We'll all be skiing together in Aspen.

Speaking of which, I leave for Salt Lake City on Friday.  A quick trip to the Mormon temple and some genealogy work, then off to Park City for Sundance and skiing.  I'm worried.  I haven't skied in like fifteen years.  I'm preoccupied with getting everything together and into a bag.  I don't even remember what cold is.  Hats, gloves, thermal underwear, goggles, outerwear. . . all so I can sit in the lodge and drink.  People will know me.  Everything I have is fifteen years old.  What colors!

I swear, I swear, soon I will do some serious photos.  But you try posting something daily.  For years and years.  For free and with only your own resources.  Only an egomaniac or neurotic madman would do something like that.

"I Read Memories. I Read the Future."

More Cathouse photos.  I swore away from them, I know.  But it is like crack. I'll need a sponsor, a counselor, a social network, some Antabuse, someone from the priesthood, and some welfare money if I am going to quit.  The girls won't leave me alone.  Just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in.

Last night I did a shoot with Drug Skinny for her website.  I don't do things like that, but I did for her because. . . I'm a good guy?  I feel I owe her?  O.K.  O.K.  She knows I'm writing stories about her.  Said it was fine.  Last night, she said she was writing stories about me.

"?!?!?!?!?!?," I said.

Never thought of that before.  I think she's been taking pictures of me, too, with her shoe phone.

"You don't know anything about me," I protested.  And that's true.

"Oh, you don't know what I know," she said.  She sells herself as being paranormal.  She makes money on the web with that.

"You're paranormal for subnormals," I told her.  "What do you read?  Cards?  Tea leaves?  Auras? Bumps on the cranium?"

"I read memories," she said.  "I read the future."

How can I resist a girl like that?  She may not be paranormal, but she's far enough outside the realm of normal to be interesting.  Para-usual at least.

So we dressed her up like a gypsy.  Or she did, rather.  I wanted nothing to do with styling this.  I was just the camera guy.

Afterwards, we went to dinner.  Her phone kept dinging.

"What the hell?"

"It's responses to my YouTube site.  I made a forty second video this afternoon and posted it.  I got four hundred hits the first hour."

"What was it?"

"Just a dominatrix thing."

Ding.  Ding.

She checked her phone for a minute.

"A guy just sent me 100 Euros.  Another guy sent me $90.  In the last two hours I've made almost two hundred dollars."

"For what?  What are they buying?"

She looked at me like I was needy.

"They just like the video, I guess."

"What?  They just watch a YouTube video and send you money?"

She started reading me comments.

"OMG.  You just made my pants tight.  I hope there are many more of these.  You're so beautiful.  I love you.  I want to be your slave."

These were separate comments, not one person.  She showed me the video.  She didn't look like a dominatrix.  She was sitting in a bra talking into the computer.  I couldn't hear what she was saying, but she wasn't even made up.

"Jesus Christ," I said.  "I guess this is what happens when people lose religion."

The girl's a born money maker.

"You pay for dinner," I said.

Do you think you know what's going on in the world?  You don't.  Nobody does.  It is impossible.  We have a small little piece of it and enlarge that in our minds to encompass others.  But that's not it.  I've sheltered myself away from the weirdness for a long, long time, but now it is back on me like a hurricane.  The world has gone mad.  These are surely the Last Days.  You'll see.  Revelations.  There will be no shelter from the storm.

But I must button up and get ready for another day at the factory.  There is that.  It is the regular, most pernicious horror.  It is like sunrise and clockwork.  It is what I have.  It is what I count on.  It is what we call normal.

When the Whip Comes Down

You told me again,
You preferred handsome men, 
But for me you would make an exception.

("Chelsea Hotel," Leonard Cohen)

I've pretty much counted on that.

Q says his blog readership has taken off in recent weeks, I assume since he has been posting baby pictures.  He's found the money river.  Struck gold.  I think the whole pregnancy thing has been a career move, really.  He talks about "the plan."

I'm going to need a "plan."  I can't keep living randomly in random times.  Stability is the "new weird." Newly minted stability, that is.  I can't write about making a big pot of delicious vegetable beef soup last night for dinner with my mother.  Nobody cares about that.  Nope.  People like puppies.

But I don't have one.  A plan, I mean.  I'll just have to ride it out.  Although I've been thinking of abandoning Cafe Selavy and starting a couple of new blogs, one written by a teenage girl and the other by a multi-racial gangsta.  It would be a challenge, I know, but I'm up for it.  An artist has to stretch.  Illustrations will be difficult, but it will force me in an entirely new direction.  Prom dresses and crack pipes.

I'll think on it.

Mornings After

Mornings after a big night out are always thrilling.  Drug Skinny sent this to me the day after our shoot on Friday night.  Wasted youth.  Etc.  I felt bad just staying up late working at the computer.  I looked worse Saturday morning, too.  I always look worse than this.  I hope she never will.

I never really liked staying up late, even when I was in college.  My roommate and I would go downtown on a Saturday night and hang around outside some bar talking shit to one another and to anyone we might recognize.  Sometimes we'd gather a little crowd of shit talkers leaning against the wall, standing on one leg, the other on the wall for balance, stoop shouldered, hands in pockets, looking down, cool cats one and all.

Until around midnight.

Once in awhile we would go into the bar.  It would be a special occasion.  Something had to be happening, usually an exceptional band or maybe a beautiful girl or two.  Either way, we would just sit back and marvel, basking in the glow of aesthetic greatness, passing sideways glances like little boys who caught a peek of their friend's older sister walking in a towel from her bedroom to the bathroom.

But I don't want to undersell it.  I mean. . . we were cool.  And we were known in our famous college town.  Not for hanging out in bars necessarily, though if you'd seen us, you'd know what I mean, but for our prowess on the basketball courts.  We were gym rats and played for hours every day.  And we were hippies with hair falling down our backs.  We played in a sea of jocks, of frat boys and college athletes.  We'd play to piss them off.  Our secret was that we were small and slow.  Like an old white man in slippers.  But we were smart and knew the game and played skilled team ball, and I think they would just fall asleep.  We won and won and won, even against teams much more talented.  It was stupid good fun.

Maybe it made us tired.  I don't know.  But anything after midnight was dangerous territory, and we were usually home by then.

I'm not saying we were normal.  But it doesn't seem to me that everyone stayed up all night every night like the kids I know.  Nobody seems to ever sleep now.  I get up in the morning and check emails, and the inbox is full of stuff from three a.m.  Always.

I've rebelled against many things, but not the comfort of going to bed.  I remember being sent to bed while the adults talked.  I'd leave my door open so I could hear them in our small house, the low buzz of human voices as I tried to listen safely snuggled up, falling deeper, deeper. . . deeper. . . .

I didn't shower yesterday.  I didn't leave the house for more than an hour and a half to run some errands.  The sky is bright and the light crystalline and the air cold so that the wind cuts through your clothing.  It was good to sit inside and read and watch the first full football game of the year.  I normally can't watch them for all the commercials and jock commentators, but the San Francisco/New Orleans game was a miracle.  Even the commentators were good.  The game took me back to something, to some better time.  It merged past and present as good things should.  It was perfect.

After that, I thought to watch the Denver/New England game, but the commentators put me off from the start.  The redneck coach's cadence of Phil Simms shallow observations made it seem like NASCAR.  I had wanted to watch Tebow and God make another miracle, but somewhere in the first half some miscreant Christian organization exploited a group of kids by having them read some biblical verse in a commercial version of Jesus Camp, and I had to shut it off.  I kept wondering how people would react if Jews and Moslems and Buddhists and the Moonies started doing the same thing.

This morning I feel greasy and want a shower, but the gym doesn't open until noon, so I will probably wait until after my workout to do that.  I feel like Drug Skinny's photograph.  But I've just remembered that the factory is closed Monday for MLK Day, so I have a reprieve, and extra day of being just me.  Oooo.  I like that.

Eternal Verities

Drug Skinny called me out of the blue. Said she wanted to shoot.  I have quit shooting, of course.  After spending all my money on 27" iMacs and hand-built cameras and after having gotten a brand new Canon 5D, I've closed up shop.  I have a thousand million images waiting to be processed and eager models harping at me.  So I've retired.  I'm done.  I don't ever want to shoot again.

But it was Drug Skinny, after all, she who is walking, talking volumes of would-be-literature.  This would not be photography.  This would be research.

She said she wanted to bring a friend.

"I've got enough friends," I told her.  "I don't need any more."

"My friend, silly."

I love it when they don't say "stupid."

Still, I worried all day.  I hadn't been in the studio since. . . I couldn't remember.  It was a wreck.  I didn't want to make any more pictures.  My bowels were tight.  What was wrong with me I wondered again.  I meant particularly.

They showed up on time.  The friend was a charmer.  They had their own ideas about what we would do.  I told them no.  No, this wouldn't be right.  It goes against everything I believe in, I said.  I've reformed.  Q has chastised me for the sins I committed in my last post.  I'm a liar, he says.  I should just admit that I am a deviant of the ordinary kind, an Old Man with Camera.  I'm looking, I told them, for something more age appropriate.  Please, please. . . please, please.

They simply laughed at me seductively.  What is wrong with the world, I wondered.  I meant particularly.

When we finished the shoot, they told me they loved me.

"Let's get married," I said.  "We can live in my house.  I'm a good cook.  And in a few years you can leave and get the house and half the money."

They thought that was a brilliant idea.  Don't tell me young women today aren't sharp.

And of course the night ended as nights always do, the two of them hurrying to meet up with some friends downtown, me going for late sushi alone.  There are eternal verities for sure.

They began texting by the time I got back from dinner.  "Send us some pictures."

"What do you think I am, some old man who sits at home alone on a Friday night looking at pictures of naked women?  You insult me."

"But you are," Drug Skinny texted back.  "We love you.  Send us pictures."

I had just finished this one and sent it, "old man or nearly so myself" (sort of Steinbeck).  Foolishly, I worked on a couple more and didn't get to bed until way past my preferred bedtime.  So I am late and woozy today.  They probably got home a few hours ago.  Q, you can have it your way.  It doesn't matter.  There comes a point when you don't get to choose any longer.  Everything gets chosen for you.  Sort of.  All we are left with in the end is our ability to say, "I prefer not to."  But that's about it.  I'll keep telling my stories the way I want.  Trust me.  Nobody believes them anyway.

Darwin and Dating

I want to write you stories.  I do.  But today I slept late.  Really late, which feels great, but which puts me behind the eight ball for other things.  I have a meeting in an hour at the factory for which I can't be late, and I live half an hour from where it will occur.  I still have to clean up and dress.  And I must straighten up so that the maids can clean while I'm gone.  So there can be no story today.  But I will return to story telling again.  I will, though it scares me since they are true stories with only the names changed, and they are my stories, not theirs which would sound completely different from mine, of course.  I wouldn't end up the schlemiel in every one of theirs, I'm sure.  I'd have to come out wise once in a while.

What I do have time to recount, though, is a vignette about age appropriate dating.  I was seated with my ex-friend Brando one night at a bar for architects and lawyers and doctors and other various assholes.  I mean different from the kind that Brando and I were.  We had membership cards, too, but they were a different color.  A friend of Brando's, a pediatrician, sat down with her husband and they began to chat.  I knew them tangentially through Brando, and thus was a minor part of the conversation.  Somehow, though, we began talking about the girl I was dating and she felt free to comment on the relationship.

"What could you possibly have in common," she asked.  It was the dumbest of questions, of course.

"What do you mean?" I queried back.

"What do you have to talk about?" she said like a nun cursing Satan.

"Well, last night while she was practicing a violin piece to the metronome, I started opining about the difference between classical music and jazz.  It was about the metronome, I said.  She was learning to play the written music precisely, exactly as it was written.  I said that jazz was all improvisational.  She stopped playing and said that Beethoven was actually the greatest improvisational musicians of all time.  Well, I was over my head and so sat through a very long and complicated music lesson."

Then I looked at her husband.

"What did you all talk about last night?  401Ks and how best to position yourselves for retirement?"

He looked at me and gave a sideways grin.  I think I'd hit it square on the head.  The pediatrician said nothing.

"I'm not a bottom feeder.  The women I date are bright.  They don't need me.  Not for anything.  I don't have money.  I drive a shit beater car.  I don't have a lot of disposable income.  But I'm well read and a fine cook and I don't spend a lot of time talking about golf or country clubs.  Most single women, women who do not have children, women who are happy and bright and fun--well the pool of women my age who meet those criteria is very, very small.  They've gotten married and had children long ago.  So what do you propose, that I sit on my ass and twiddle my thumbs because I waited too long?  Fuck that.  I'm going fishing in the big pond.  I want to be happy, too."

As always, of course, I'd gone too far for the social situation.  Fortunately for me, though, Brando got more of a kick out of such things than most even though the woman was a paying client.

There is something Darwinian about courting.  It isn't as static as some would have it be.  I haven't figured it out, I just know the consequences.  But I've spent too much time with this and now will be late for my meeting.  Shit, shit, shit.

Manly?

Boy.  I guess you are hungry for this sort of tell-all fare.  Well, then. . . perhaps I might continue.

The night went weird, but that was at a time when I was in the mood for such things.  The girl I was dating was a student at Country Club College, young and a bit nutty in a modest way.  She was just what I needed then, wild and talented and sophisticated.  You will call me a liar in your hearts, but I swear to you, it is all true.  She came to my door one night when I was lonely and quite alone for a good while.  You might remember the story.  She worked for my tenant and had come to request a key to get into the apartment to get something her boss/my tenant needed for work.  I gave her a hard time and then the key and told her to let herself in when she came back.  I would be where I had been--on the couch with a movie and a scotch.

When she came back, I asked her if she would like something to drink, and much to my surprise, she said yes.  I was well stocked and when she asked for a Blue Moon, I was able to provide.  Impressive, perhaps.  She stayed and chatted up and down, me rising more and more to the occasion.  She was a violinist, she said, and played first chair in the city's symphony orchestra.  She had her violin in the car, and so I asked her to get it.  And the walls of my home were thrilled.  We had not heard the likes here before.

When she left, I told her that I would not bother her, but if she ever wanted to play for me again, she could call.  And she did call--from the car about ten minutes later.   She was busy the next night, she said, but would like to see me the following.  Oh, I said.  That would be fine.

The loneliness was ending, I thought, and now there was this.  She was from a good family, it turned out, her father a semi-famous architect.  Her most recent boyfriend was a music major at the college, too, and not long ago had graduated and was currently playing bass guitar on some very famous albums.  And now. . . me?  I thought about what the famous doctor prescribed.  Buy the ticket, take the ride.

I met her that next time at a downtown cafe that I knew well.  She was with two of her friends.  They were equally young and sophisticated and crazy it seemed to me who was not.  And so I sat in paranoid wonder waiting for the proverbial shoe to drop.

The next night was her birthday.  I had a night shift at the factory that ended at nine, and when it was over, I took a bottle of wine and some flowers to her apartment.  Why was she there alone, I wondered?  I knocked.  She answered.  She asked me in.

By the time we met the couple at the Italian restaurant, we had been together for quite some time.  A couple years, really.  And you know what happens.  Things.  And stuff.  And I could never really take it all very seriously anyway as I was older than her parents.  We had gone to visit them once.  They were pleasant enough to me and even invited us to lunch at the Country Club the next day.  That, I think, was some sort of literary coup, but I have yet to write about it.  I will, one day.  I will write it, but you will call me a liar.

Dinner done and Carrot Head departed, the couple asked if we would like to go for a drink.  I knew just the place.  It was one of our favorite places to go because it had an eclectic juke box and a run-down redneck crowd right in the middle of a gentrified part of town.  And they had pool tables.  We would go there every few weeks and play Frank Sinatra albums and buy cheap pitchers of Budweiser and play pool in between dancing, me crooning loudly along with Frank. . . "Fly me to the moon. . . ."  Yes, it would be perfect.  It would be fun.

My girl was all bright eyed about it, too.  I will not, of course, tell you about the secret lives of men and women, but I like to think that I am the opposite of what I most dislike.  I mean, I am very wicked, but I have an extremely good heart.  And though sometimes what we want may not be the best thing for us. . . oh, we can let those things play out in words in the darkness without ever bringing them to light.

But my girl, as I said. . . she had bright eyes.

The first part went as planned.  There were rednecks and there was beer and pool, and there was that seducer Frank Sinatra in dollar after dollar's worth of seductive song.

We played doubles, me paired with the restaurant beauty and my girl with her boy.  He was a new attorney and as full of all that as he could be for he had begun late and was now in his mid-thirties.  He was with a big firm downtown and was bland but for that, so he used what he had like gold.  And he was reasonably successful to some extent.  But the gorgeous girl was not his yet, and they were on a date to "try it out."  As far as I could tell, it wasn't working the way it might.  You could feel it in the air as the attorney stood too close to my girl to help her line up a shot.  He was younger than I, and, I thought, I might have to give him a whipping, though size and age were not giving me much of a hand.  But oh, we were drunk, the gorgeous girl most of all, and I was not at all far behind.  So as Frank sang in his most earnest way and she leaned a little too close into me, I might have tilted my head--you know, as they do in the movies.

And that was when things began to go wrong.  Suddenly I could see that she was a born problem maker.  She was not a nice girl at all but one who liked to cause trouble.  I had been blinded, I admit, but suddenly I could see it all clearly.  Nope.  This was her fault.  It was wrong.  She had planned something like this all along.

"Do something," she yelled to the attorney.  "He tried to kiss me!"  I looked at my date who was on the verge of laughter.  "O.K." I thought, and turned a slow look to Our New Friend, Esq.  What the hell.  Let's just do this now.  I hadn't liked him all night long anyway.  But for all the wanton male tales he had regaled us with in the course of the evening, he was finished.  Done.  It turned out, I could tell, not to be his best night.

He looked at her and said, "Get a beer."  And with that, she went undone.  Something had snapped. The last of the Xanax had kicked in maybe.  But her body could no longer hold itself upright.  She went limp.  Tired.  Loose as a goose.

I walked over to my girl.  "I think we should leave," I said, and she giggled in reply. "You think?"  I liked her more just then.

With Frank Sinatra singing about Brazil, we put away our cue sticks and went to say goodnight.  Gorgeous was sitting at the bar now, slumped, one hand to her cheek, her eyes somewhere far away.  And our new attorney friend?  He had been hopeful, but now all that was left was a girl on empty who hadn't much use for his brand of masculinity and a bar full of hostile redneck men.

Outside, I looked at my girl.  She seemed quite happy given everything.

"Well, um. . . I thought they would be better than that."

"Yea.  They were both after me all night."

"What?"

She looked at me like I was retarded.

"He was hitting on me from the start.  He kept asking me out.  Said terrible things about you.  Here.  Look.  He gave me his card with his home phone."

On the back he had written a number in pen.

"When I went to the bathroom, she came with me into the stall and started kissing me.  She was a mess."

"Well that's just awful," I said, feeling quite the fool.  "Why'd you let him do that?"

But my girl liked me, and I took solace in the fact.  I just wanted to get home.

"I hate going out, don't you?" I asked her.  "It is not worthwhile."

She just laughed the way you can when you are young and pretty and all of life is still ahead of you and there seems never to be any real consequences.

"Sure," she said.  "Let's go home."

And I was full of resolutions that night, and there was no talking in the dark.  Only the deep and desperate desire of one who has only that and nothing else, who still has one last thing against someone who still has many.  And then the silent nothingness of late and needed sleep.

I know--that tells us nothing more about Carrot Head.  But there is time.

Manly

I've been sleeping later in the mornings.  I don't know why I am able to, but it feels good.  I had to force myself out of bed at seven today.  I am guessing that I have had no virus but just a good old dose of bad depression.  Still, it is good to sleep.  It leaves me no time in the morning, though, for my regular routine.  I would write my Cafe posts at night, but they have been all jammed up.

Let me tell you quickly as I remember it how it all started with Carrot Head.  He is a well-known prick, but there are plenty of those.  Still, I don't take to people upstaging me well.  Or trying to, I should say.

This was many years ago.  I was sitting with my girlfriend of the time at a cute little Italian restaurant that was in a house in an old neighborhood in town.  It was a small, intimate place with good beers and wines and just above average food.  But the waiters and waitresses were extraordinarily beautiful and attentive, and the owner, who was a bit of a swordsman, or at least liked to act that way, knew me and enjoyed the women I brought to his little restaurant, so I got good tables and good service.  It was a fine, magical place to spend a romantic evening.

On this particular night, we were sitting at a terrace table outside.  Through the big plate glass window, I saw a stunning woman with dark hair who seemed to have also noticed me, and for some time I kept catching glances.  To my surprise, she and her date left their table and walked outside, approached our table, introduced themselves and asked if they might not join us.  Weird you say?  I know.  But the past was enchanted and life was richer and such things used to happen.

After they sat down, the owner/swordsman was especially attentive.  You could smell his Italian blood as it rose from a simmer.  And while we all chatted in the perfect night, Carrot Head rolled up.  The owner, of course, immediately called to him and lavished his attentions on old Carrot like he was a teenage girl.  In a moment, we had disappeared.  Which would have been fine if they had wandered off, but they didn't and so we sat, spectators to this horror.  Before the minute was out, though, I'd had enough and restarted the table conversation.  I have to say, though, that our new friends were completely smitten by Carrot and the aura of his minor fame, and my newfound friend couldn't seem to take her eyes off him.  For that, neither could her date, and old Carrot who loved his fame and all genders much was ready to take their flattery for fuel.  By now, I was wishing them all gone.  My wine glass was empty and we hadn't ordered and things were going south.  My girl, who knew the size of my ego and my peculiar temperament was looking at me but I could tell that she had an ear cocked to the other conversation, too.  I had been trying not to pay attention, but Carrot, napkin in hand, was asking for a pen.  He was taking numbers, it seemed, and was talking to my date.  And so I decided to be clever.  Really. It just didn't come out that way.

"Get the fuck away from the table," is how it came out.  The owner's grin kind of froze.  Carrot gave me a look of surprise, his hand still pleading for a pen.  I could feel the frozen energy of my new friends who were not yet believing this was happening.  Of course, there was only one direction to go.  I stared into his stupid eyes.

"Nobody wants your number."  I continued to stare.  I mean, there was nothing else to do.

The owner put his arm around Carrot and moved him toward the bar.  My girl looked at me and laughed.

"Fuck, I don't like that asshole," I said.  "I don't like him at all.  So," I offered my new friends, "let's get something to drink."

This is only a prelude to a story.  The night turned weirder, and my relationship with Carrot Head continued for quite awhile.  But I haven't time to write it now.  I should not have begun this at all.  I'm late late late for everything.  The factory boss is already on me.  I don't have time to reread this, don't have time to decide if I should keep it.  I must simply hit the "Publish" button and run.

This is no way to live.

Role Models

I just liked the photograph.  Turns out to be Grace Kelly.  I didn't know by looking.  No photographer credits, but it is gorgeous, surely Kodachrome, and almost three dimensional.  This is what we want the snapshots of our lives to look like, but this is no snapshot.  I read a criticism of Hollywood on the CNN website today for making jobs look better than they are.  Everyone is pretty, even those playing the homely folks.  People are not dressed conservatively enough.  They have too much time for lunches and life beyond the workplace.  Their lives are far too interesting.

Duh.

But the writer said it was dangerous for young people.  Said they make career choices based on what they see on T.V. and in movies.  Police investigators are not wearing Gucci, etc.

Holy Moly!  Who knew?  Children have nobody at home to teach them anything, and when they go to college, their profs are reinforcing the stereotypes they see on the screen.  Somebody needs to make a really boring show about life with plain people in ordinary clothing where they do nothing but work at computers and make inane comments to one another that mimic what they heard on television the night before.

Somebody should have told Shakespeare.

I find great benefit, though, in channeling Falstaff sometimes.  Just the other day at the factory, I was Swearinger from "Deadwood."  I may be Spartacus today.

Oh, it doesn't always work out, of course.  But what does?  One of my colleagues told me the other day that I was trying to be God.  I thought of Woody Allen and said, "Well, you have to have role models."

Of course there's always "Jersey Shore."

Congratulations Old Sport

I'm sitting on new cameras galore and have quit taking photographs.  It is typical.  I bought a new guitar once and didn't play it for about six months.  Etc. It is a guilt, perhaps, inculcated by upbringing with the cheapest of everything.  It was wise, probably, but it scarred me, if scarred is the right word.  And it wasn't my parents', really.  I am just a prick.  They gave me more than the other hillbillies around me had.   That was in part due to my being an only child.  I was spoiled.  So I was cool enough in my 'hood.  But my 'hood wasn't the world.  My parents were immune to the world, it seems.  My mother still is.  "It all comes from the same place, they just put different labels on them."  That is her life's mantra.  "Good enough."  She has never indulged herself on anything.  She was scarred herself by growing up with a ne'er do well father during the depression.  He was a loathsome man in most respects.  I'll tell you about that another time.  I have never really thought about that until now and I want to gather my thoughts about him before I begin.  Because of him, though, my mother has given herself comforts, no doubt.  But they are always the cheapest of comforts.  I have gone a couple steps further.  Still, the guilt is always with me.

But it could be something else.  Some band has snapped.  I have worn myself out completely.  I slept all weekend and did nothing.  I would like to do that ad infinitum.  I have millions of photos that need working, but I can't bring myself to do it.  I have a new 27" iMac and a Wacom tablet and a room that has been straightened and cleaned.  But I don't want to go in there.  And the thought of beginning a new project makes me want to weep.  So for now, you and I are stuck with whatever old images I can come up with.

This morning, I am up with the old men again, waiting for the day's misery to begin.  Another day at the factory.

Q's wife gave birth this weekend to a bouncing baby boy.  Let us call him Q2.  Q now has endless writing and photographic material.  He and his wife are surely the Ozzie and Harriet of the 21st Century.  Son of a gun.

Spinning Closer to the Sun

I heard this a few days ago at the gym.

"The days sure are getting shorter.  I mean it gets dark earlier than I ever remember it.  I don't even think there are twenty-four hours in a day any more."

"The earth is getting closer to the sun, so time is getting shorter.  That's why its getting warmer, too, not all this shit scientist say about the Greenhouse Effect."

I couldn't tell if he was kidding.  Neither of them laughed.  Given the bullshit that comes from some quarters, I wouldn't doubt it was something he heard on FOX or some talk radio show.

I laid up all day Saturday.  Did nothing but sleep.  My body aches and my mind doesn't want to think.  I can't tell if I have a virus or depression.  Got up much later than usual today and want to go back to bed.  All my thoughts are personal and bad.  It is terrible because the weekend weather has been perfect.  But this could be another day in bed.  And that does not provide me with writing material.

Perhaps that fellow was right, though.  Perhaps we are spinning closer to the sun.

Way Down in the Hole

Slept long, woke tired.  Went out last night with a friend to dinner.  We sat at the bar to eat, of course, two men not in an intimate or business relationship.  Guys.  And after eating too much, we went to another place for drinks.  It is a new place on the Boulevard, Italian by menu but otherwise more of a western mountain town sort of place, a fairly hip kind of decor with mile high ceilings with exposed beams and ductwork.  The bar runs for miles island style with patrons surrounding it on all sides.  Tables galore, both cafe style and more formal seating and a healthy mix of people.  It was interesting.  But I was not.  I have not been out enough in the past decade, I guess.  I've forgotten how to stand, forgotten how to look other than invisible.  What I mean is that this is a place you go to for only one reason--to be seen, to be in the milieu. I saw one of my old nemesis, the comedian Carrot Head, and as is his practice, he avoided me.  I will look back to see if I have told you my Carrot Head stories or not, and if not, perhaps I will.  But I am out of practice of standing in a crowd and my personal space is too big for crowded bars and so when some young fellow bumped me as if I were invisible. . . I responded.  I do not belong in such places, I know.  I never did.  But my friend was talking to two girls and so I stayed standing awkwardly in one place behind their chairs looking around into the nothing.  Finally I could take no more and so tapped my friend on the shoulder to tell him I was leaving.  He said he was as well, so we walked back out onto the boulevard.  We would be at Sundance in a few weeks, and we talked about which movies to see and about skiing.  And then we said goodnight and went our separate ways.

I was home, and it was not late, so I had plenty of time to think about what might make me happy.

I checked my voicemail and there was a message from Q.  He was taking his wife to the hospital to have a baby.  He was calling from the car.  I thought it best not to call him back, of course.  He would be much occupied.  Q will now have something to take his mind off of himself.  That is the best thing, I think.  Thinking about oneself is a curse, of course.  He will have plenty of help to avoid that.

"Daddy, daddy, daddy, look at me, look at me, look at me. . . ."

Good for you, old sport.  No irony there.

I poured a drink and sat with the cat.  There was plenty of night left if I wanted it, but I was tired, beaten from a hard bad week back at work.  I didn't want to think about anything at all.  Somebody needs to hook a brother up, I thought.  No, no, no. . . gotta keep the devil way down in the hole.

Manufactured Weirdness

Why, I ask myself, do I not realize things earlier before I suffer all the consequences?  I feel a normalcy in terms of awareness and intelligence, even something beyond that?  So why, I puzzle, have I not realized this thing that turns out to be such a surprise to me.

It will not overwhelm you as it has me, but I am a dull bulb this week having returned to factory work, and haven't much to talk about other than my internal workings.  So what happened is this.  I was sitting in an office with two people who picture themselves as lefties and liberals and all the rest.  Not quietly, I might add, but vociferously.  I don't know what I've taken that to mean now, but I thought to tell a story that had some weirdness to it.  And the lesbian acted as if I'd farted loudly.  The other fellow who plays at being bisexual said nothing.  And I thought, what the fuck?  Having had to insist to society that you are normal hasn't made you sensitive to the weirdness of others?  But it struck me then that truly there was nothing liberal in the larger sense that belonged to these two, that for all appearances they both were deep down conservatives who would be borderline Nazis once they had access to power.  They each were driven by a yawning self-interest and were only concerned with others as far as it helped promote their own causes.  Suddenly I was seized by the image of the last Democratic Convention and its menagerie of costumes, faces, and concerns.  Survival, I thought.  That is all.

I've been thinking since about the people I work with who like to portray themselves in wild stories of revelry, and I realized they all were set in some manufactured weirdness.  Las Vegas.  Key West.  Even Mardi Gras.  There are rules.  There you can be in the milieu of Hurricane drinks and daiquiris and people flashing their titties, but there is not real danger.  They stick to the main streets never to wander down dark alleyways.  I've always gone down alleyways.  Literally and figuratively.

Not realizing that their weirdness is as weird as the Himalayan Yeti ride at Disney is dangerous has cost me much.  They may march for transgender equality, but when I tell a story about going to a voodoo ritual with hermaphroditic club dancers and watching them sacrifice chickens by firelight. . . well. . . I won't do that again.  Not everyone likes a good story.

1%

I just wrote a long post about two articles I read this morning, one posted by CNN that announces that if you live in the U.S.A. and make more than $34,000 a year after taxes, you are in the upper 1% of the global economy.  Of course I went on in a self-effacing way for blocks of texts denigrating my lifestyle.  But then came the dramatic turning point.  I also read an article in the New York Times that reports that Americans have less class mobility than people in Europe, Britain, or Canada.  But the writing was too dicey, I thought, the humor too subtle, the ironies too delicately close to the truth.  Not wanting to completely trash it, though, I decided to bring you this precis where I can recount my wit and sensibility without having to prove it.  In writing about the relationship between feeling lucky and feeling guilty, I felt most vulnerable. That was most telling and most dangerous, so I'll leave it alone lest anyone judge me.

Let me end with some categorical thinking, though.  Again, the irony is perhaps too subtle, though not for this crowd, I trust.

Americans are stupid.  So is everybody else.  I don't want to say it any other way.

I'll think about the "meanness" scale at another time.  I'll start with the commonly accepted saw that Americans are wickedly mean and aggressive and go from there.  Perhaps I'll find some news reports about that, too.

I am apparently part of a club I didn't wish to join according to a new report on CNN this morning:

"It only takes $34,000 a year, after taxes, to be among the richest 1% in the world. That's for each person living under the same roof, including children.
"The true global middle class, falls far short of owning a home, having a car in a driveway, saving for retirement and sending their kids to college. In fact, people at the world's true middle -- as defined by median income -- live on just $1,225 a year.
"In the grand scheme of things, even the poorest 5% of Americans are better off financially than two thirds of the entire world."

O.K. I knew that.  I've travelled around the world to places that are not resorts.  I've seen and to a limited degree experienced what it means to live without material choices.  The way I live is unreal.  And I am probably much less generous (and, ooo, do not point fingers on this one, I think) than what I would tell you if asked.  I say it often.  It is simply a matter of luck, of being born where and when I was.  It could more than easily be otherwise.  I write about it often, too--organic foods, champagnes and nice wines and expensive whiskeys, aged cheeses and the foods of fat pashas, cameras and a studio and a new iMac and iPad and Kindle, and even this year a newer car, too.  I do not forget any of this a single day of my life.

To say I'm grateful might be going too far.  Hell, to say I'm happy would be worse.  To say I'm a pig could be appropriate.

And I know people who have much, much more and feel they deserve more, too.  They do not want to pay taxes.  They want to defund public education.  They want a bigger gap between themselves and others.  I tell them they are pigs as much as possible.

So what I want to ask each of you American readers to do today is this: give away your shit.  All of the tvs and electronics, your nice cars and expensive wines.  I want you to begin sharing your income with others around the world generously.  In no time, things will change.  You'll see.  Do it.

Wait a minute.  I just read this in the New York Times:

"Benjamin Franklin did it. Henry Ford did it. And American life is built on the faith that others can do it, too: rise from humble origins to economic heights.
"But many researchers have reached a conclusion that turns conventional wisdom on its head: Americans enjoy less economic mobility than their peers in Canada and much of Western Europe.
"One reason for the mobility gap may be the depth of American poverty, which leaves poor children starting especially far behind. Another may be the unusually large premiums that American employers pay for college degrees.
"A project led by Markus Jantti, an economist at a Swedish university, found that 42 percent of American men raised in the bottom fifth of incomes stay there as adults. That shows a level of persistent disadvantage much higher than in Denmark (25 percent) and Britain (30 percent) — a country famous for its class constraints.
"Despite frequent references to the United States as a classless society, about 62 percent of Americans (male and female) raised in the top fifth of incomes stay in the top two-fifths, according to research by the Economic Mobility Project of the Pew Charitable Trusts." 

I'm going to have to think about this a bit.  Europeans and Canadians are going to need to be included in this somehow.