from a mountain bench

Author: buddycushman

  • not knowing, most intimate

    Monday morning, my car blocked in by my landlord/housemate’s, who’s regularly out and up later than me, I left around 8:30 on a crazy long walk all the way to the downtown library, and back. Probably three miles, possibly four. It was a “dues” thing, like paying dues for forgetting to bring back Mary Oliver’s book of essays for a couple of months.

    I got home and I was beat. Unblocked by then, I drove over to Starbucks for a coffee. When I returned I announced I wasn’t going to attempt my Monday afternoon ritual (twice before) of climbing Bishop’s Peak to the wide grassy area below the summit, with it’s couple of welcoming benches. Just too tired.

    Maybe three hours hours later, after keto food, I decided to do the much shorter walk up Cerro San Luis to my bench, often passing close by cows – there were six Monday, and I had a sweet staring contest with the closest, her eyes deep, midnight pools. I was going to sit on the very bench pictured with each of these posts, and play Motown records on the phone. Dance a little.

    I arrived there, and for reasons I did not and still do not understand, I paused long enough to bow and then kept going and did not stop until I reached the top, a few dozen feet below a solitary silver pole on a pile of scary rocks in the howling wind.

    I’d been entirely fetched by August the fourth.

  • time has come today

    One of the things I have come to love about San Luis Obispo is the way time takes its time here.

    I guess I notice it most often when I’m driving — I’m there and now I’m here, the digital watch in the Camry having rolled a new number six or seven, maybe eight times. From one side of the city to another.

    At the invitation of the local artist Drew Davis, with whose work I am enchanted, I visited Art in the Park Sunday. When I left I took the quiet roads way over to my Starbucks at Broad and South. I think it took six minutes. When I’d drive to the YMCA from my former room, on Broad, it would take five minutes. From my new room here in Chumash Village on South Higuera — way farther away — it takes nine.

    But these are just tangible exhibits. I haven’t mentioned the magic. I’ve discovered two mountains here and have climbed both, and on both discovered benches where I, as Jefferson Airplane once sang, “sit and think about you and me.” And you know I struggle to haul myself up to these benches, stopping every 10-15 feet in oxygen debt. Yet there have been times when my arrival there to sit and rejoice, time noted on the phone pulled out to take a picture of a friendly cow or the vast expanding terrain, is earlier than when I started out.

    “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. . . .” The Red Queen, ‘Through the Looking Glass’

    That’s the way time can, and does, work here in San Luis Obispo. At least for me. Truly.

  • a trail of bread crumbs

    A month or so before I moved from San Diego to San Luis Obispo I went to the post office and completed a ‘change of address’ form. Additionally, I verified it on-line, as directed. I also went back to the post office and had it confirmed that I’d crossed T’s and dotted I’s and things were set.

    That was three and a half months ago and I have yet to receive a forwarded piece of mail from back there on W. Upas Street. I mean, I know I don’t get a lot of mail, being a loner, gypsy, wandering, bedouin kind of person. But not one piece? And I recently repeated following the directions on the post office box, in my move from Broad to S Higuera streets here in SLO. Ditto – no mail.

    Now, hop into the time machine and it’s September 1982 and I am crashing in a back room in Nicky and Heather’s graduate student housing at the University of California Irvine. Drinking Hamm’s and Olympia, stealing and smoking their pot, paying no rent. I’ve had nothing forwarded from anywhere, cause why would I? And one afternoon the telephone rings and I’m the only one there and I pick it up to take a message for one of them, and on the line is the State of Massachusetts asking for me, because there’s this issue of unpaid student loans they’d like to talk about.

    People can find you. The post office can find me, especially since I’ve gone out of my way to tell them where I am. I guess maybe some – and quite possibly most – of the time, I don’t get it. Forwarded mail – or understanding.

  • both sides now

    Though it’s always my intention not to, every once in a while in the blog I stray into my Zen practice, using that particular language, being all yakety yak about it. When I see I’ve done so, my initial response is a feeling I ought to apologize – to you, to me.

    Which is interesting. Because I experience that like I’d be apologizing for being right-handed. Or green-eyed. Or having parents named Irene and Win. How can these things not be? How can I not be my practice?

    So – he writes – I’m sitting in a coffee shop, writing about my life at the Y, and life in the trailer park, and on the side of a mountain. And all of a sudden Dongshan ( 807 – 869 ) is sitting at the next table over. Maybe looking at me. And here’s the thing, which I sense as amazing and baffling and cool – he’s never not there.

    “That’s the way it’s gotta be. Living in a fantasy. It’s you for you and me for me. From now on.” – Supertramp

    “I am what I eat.”

  • it’s like this

    I haven’t yet discussed here in ‘from a mountain bench’ the special gratitude and bigger heart I feel and have for somehow creating a new space in which I can appear Mondays through Fridays as my often goofy and brakeless self. How I experience the simple act of sitting here at this keyboard and with my two 76-year-old index fingers spin something like tales of wonder and joy.

    My heart was already broken when I arrived in San Luis Obispo Easter Sunday, a car impossibly loaded, a five-and-a-half hour boogie from pre-dawn San Diego, stopping only in Oxnard for a coffe, bacon and egg bites, and two restroom visits. But just two weeks into this new life, and pecking away on my laptop – my faithful desktop in parts in two bags in a closet – my blog broke. Couch Surfing at 70, just an infant way back in August of 2018, about to be pronounced sayonara so soon after arriving here. My heart breaking all over again.

    Then after two months of difficult living and lucking into this room in this trailer in this park, my landlord/housemate helped me pick up a $15 thrift shop desk and my computer came out of the closet. I paid for new hosting and the new ‘mountain bench’ domain, and 30 of you have shown up to travel this path with me again.

    Something about invited home. It’s very cool. I am very, very grateful.

  • Lula’s kid

    Long ago, when “couch surfing at 70” was still a thing, I offered a post about how grateful I was to live in a world that included Stevie Wonder. Yesterday I heard The Beach Boys cover of “I Was Made to Love Her,” and was instantly filled with all those big, grateful, joyful feelings again.

    Stevie’s mom, Lula Mae Hardaway, was one of the writers of ‘Made to Love Her.’ How totally cool is that! I had a flash of sitting at the kitchen table back in Wareham, MA with my mom, Irene, both of us with typewriters, banging out words and music filled with back-then soul, maybe to be recorded by Martha and The Vandellas. Or The Pet Shop Boys. Like, totally, oh my head!!

    ‘Made to Love Her’ flew all the way to number two on the Billboard charts – which I’d rather be reading a lot more than the DSM-IV any day. The number one song blocking its path? – “Light My Fire” by The Doors. All of this when I was in high school.

    I’ll tell you, my memories can be so far out. Even the ones that never happened.

  • one diamond or another

    There is a clubhouse here at the trailer park, and joyfully two of its walls are filled with hardcover and paperback books and DVD’s – there for the taking with the pinky-swear unspoken agreement they will be borrowed, enjoyed, and returned. In my three-plus weeks here I’ve borrowed, read, and returned four paperbacks. The DVD “Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist” sits ready on the small, blue table I scarfed off the sidewalk when I moved to San Diego almost four years ago.

    I guess this is my life today in a northern town – north of San Diego. Along with tons of walking; oxygen-debt breathing my way up two mountains, and considering benches on each ‘home;’ somehow finding myself at the front desk of the local YMCA; lounging in perhaps too many of ‘those meetings;’ and all the while exploring the psychic and sensual realms of aloneness.

    Meanwhile, as the song goes, “The Red Sox Are Winning.”

  • hold me closer tiny dancer

    I’ve been wondering about my mind. Not a lot, no obsession or angsty internal drama. And yet, every once in a while, maybe four or five days pass, and the thought comes, in the shape of a wonder, regarding losing it. Like, totally. Something within the broad arms of insanity – the clinical style, DSM-IV stuff.

    In the Zen group last night I described the experience as my mind emptying out. Not like the way-cool Zen awakening of the bottom falling out of the bucket. Though, maybe it is like that. I’ve been having, all over the place, this opposite, don’t agree at all, contrarian experience with much of what I hear. And think. And feel. How I experience sobriety. How I experience life in the big city.

    I’m not worried about any of this. It’s sort of interesting. Is this what happens? Is this what it feels like? Is this, maybe hopefully, my practice. Or is this crossing the street to bat-shit crazy?

    I’m dancing a lot. Last Friday I was dancing as loose as I’ve ever been making my way along the Bob Jones Trail. Sunday morning on the mountain, right at the very bench you see in the picture accompanying this post, I was dancing so high above it all, a “They can’t take away our music” celebration. This is me here now – dancing. Rejoicing.

    I was dancing before this blog got built and after it got built. The Isley Brothers sang, “This old heart of mine been broke a thousand times.” It’s like that, the sense my mind is breaking, and for all I know I may find myself in a ‘Looney Tune’ cartoon sooner than later. Or ‘Mad Magazine.’ Or with 5150 paperwork stuffed into my back pocket. Or, just a peaceful, easy feeling.

    Pictures telling stories.

  • drivin’ around

    Yesterday I shelled out $948 for suddenly necessary repairs to my car. Happily, by Sunday night, I had settled into a que sera sera place for whatever expense was coming, and when I was told the cost yesterday it was okay. It’s just this. The sky is blue. It cost to own a car.

    I love my 2002 Camry with its nearly paint-less hood and sweet sound system, its six-CD changer when dropped at the garage Monday morning loaded with two Beach Boys, two Sonic Youth, The Clash, and The Jeff Beck group. I love having a driver’s license — it’s delivered me from Cape Cod in 2008 to Portland, Oregon and on to San Diego and now here in San Luis Obispo in California. And that’s just the last 17 years. I love California.

    My mechanically spiffed-up Camry will in a few hours magical-pumpkin me to a four-and-a-half hour shift at the YMCA and – the creek don’t rise – back to the trailer for my Tuesday night Zen Koan group via Zoom.

    Zen on Zoom. New ignition in the Camry. Not two.

  • moving

    I think my mind broke the other day. All by itself.

    I was on the Bob Jones Trail in Avila Beach on the central coast of California. I was much of the way back from one end to the other. Out of the woods, which is most of it and includes a vast area of Coast Live Oaks, big and gnarly and curvy and which I’ve been convinced from the beginning dance wildly in the middle of the night when no humans are around and end up back where they started by dawn, though maybe moved a fifteenth of an inch or so – if anyone bothered to check.

    So I’m out of the woods in the area that runs alongside the San Luis Obispo Creek, the section that has reeds like cat ‘n nine tails. I happen to glance to my left and a tall piece of grass on the bank closest is slowly swaying in the breeze, and – bang! – I see it completely. There’s nothing else. That’s when my mind broke. Every single thing in the world was exactly in tune with everything else, working exactly perfectly.

    I haven’t been able to shake it. I haven’t wanted to. My teacher says, “Move on.”