for Gavin

I’m feeling very much a punk rocker lately. I sold my electric and acoustic guitars preparing to leave San Diego, just no room in the Camry for the journey to San Luis, and needed the cash. Sold the solid state Fender amp I’d bought for $40 from a kid off the Martin Luther King highway in SD, don’t remember to who or for how much. Maybe I gave it away. Maybe it’s in this room somewhere. Which is all background for I’m seriously feeling like a punk rocker and there’s nothing to make music on. Probably why I’m living on YouTube with headphones, listening to Dinosaur Jr and The Cure and most lately Portland’s own Wipers, who I never heard of my 12 years living there. All this — think of the song “New York’s a Lonely Town When You’re the Only Surfer Boy Around” (The Trade Winds, 1965) — and you feel me.

I think inadvertently shaving my head two weeks ago is the cause of some of this. Then there’s the quiet angst of doing everything alone, talking to vultures and little lizards, and myself, living for coffee and way too much peanut butter. Spending nearly all my money on bitchin’ hiking shoes and an endless stream of used Zen/Ch’an books. Here’s the most recent – “Original Teachings of Ch’an Buddhism’, translated and with an introduction by Chang Chung-Yuan. Who may be a lizard in this lifetime. Which doesn’t matter to anyone except me, and even that sends me a small ache, here with no guitar, no strap, no amp. 

Showing up to this blog (and older sister ‘Couch Surfing at 70) nearly all the weekdays of the last seven years probably has something to do with it. And add 14 years of Morning Pages 24/7, those Pages never as “out there” – mirror mirror on the wall – as they are now.

I don’t know. All this time on mountains and hills and in the landscape, vast open spaces and the woods, I may find myself as a wannabe punk rocker more likely mistaken for “It’s a Beautiful Day” than “Husker Du”. And me up there on the mountain bench, all my Motown, “Da Doo Ron Ron.”