Category: Uncategorized

So, here I am in an attic and this time next week – if the creek don’t rise – in a basement. Life falling out in front of me. I’m leaving because I’m leaving. Wild adventures arriving. Connie and Weymouth knew this stuff before me. Doug would laugh.

I’m typing this only an hour after yesterday’s post – my love letter to an old friend – on my laptop because my desktop, the only device I’m comfortable with, continued its journey toward failure after adding Windows 11 a few months back by coming up with some pretty evil reality virus-thing yesterday. Suddenly there’s no access to my blog, my credit union, and most of my saved pages. Most of the most important. Jorge has offered to magically appear inside my computer and poke around for problems, but even the emails won’t open. Annie Hall would say, “Ladeeda.” I’m kind of there too, add a smidge of puff the magic dragon.

This promises to be a wild and physically demanding week, and now my primary tool of navigating through my day-to-day world is ready for last rights. Fortunately I’m all in with the glimmer and wonder of strolling the path – my eyes focused on what’s working – all that abundance – and not on what isn’t.

So, this post, if it finds its way to your email, and any others in the foreseeable future, will be flying out from here, likely less wordy.

Me and Chicago – “Does anybody really know what time it is?”

Doug.

Dr. Douglas Martin, PhD in Urban Studies UCLA, founder and CEO of the Westside Center for Independent Living – CIL – the second in the state of California and almost surely the country. Polio victim at age six, the remainder of his life in a chair until he passed away in 2003. One of my all-time best friends. Not enough space here for the next month of weekdays to begin to explain why.

Twisted for sure. Incredibly lovable. Filled with courage. Bravery in all ten directions. Kind, generous, funny, irreverent. He’d be on Wilshire Blvd in West LA, I’d be on School Street in Somerville, MA, my phone on the kitchen wall would ring, I’d pick it up, and Doug would say this — “Bud. Thompson Twins.”

The entirety of our conversation. If someone should ask me this Monday what was my original face before my parents were born, I’d hold up a picture of Doug.

“I can’t get enough of de Kooning.” It was my first thought when I opened my eyes.

In the summer of 1977 I was sleeping on a floor in my friend’s cottage in Venice Beach, a block off the ocean. I was 28 years old. I was crazy for de Kooning, saw myself one day as a great abstract expressionist. Otherwise I didn’t care about much else. In three hours I had to open up Zeppy’s Pizza on the walkway. I had the key.

At quarter past ten Gabe and I were sitting on stools at the counter in Mary Lou’s, a greasy spoon off Pacific Ave and about 500 yards from Zeppy’s. We’d worked together in a runaway house on the grounds of a crazy hospital back in Massachusetts. First Gabe moved out to California and I followed a year later. By then he had a good job and roomates, which was why I was sleeping on the floor of his bedroom. But we’d decided to get a place together, and had filled out applications for a second-floor apartment just off Ocean Park in Santa Monica.

“There’s someone I want you to meet,” Gabe was saying, stuffing the last third of a cigarette in a glass ashtray. “My boss. His name’s Doug, I think you two will get along. He’s slightly twisted.” Gabe gave me a corner-of-the-eye look. “Know what I mean?”

That Gabe, a laugh a minute. But it turns out he was right on both counts — Doug was slightly twisted; big time and in the flesh. And we for sure got along just fine. We stuck together like glue.

Doug.

The past two days I have been stopped at the front door of interviews for positions for which I was entirely qualified three times because I wouldn’t work all of the posted part-time hours. Like – We posted for 20, you’re offering 15, no thanks.

Um, What’s the goal?

In his book, ‘The 4-Hour Work Week,’ Tim Ferriss makes the case that if you hand someone a 40-hour, full-time job description with a list of specific objectives it will take that person all 40 hours to get it done. Yet, if you hand someone the same description of objectives to be accomplished in their 20-hour, half-time work week, she/he will get it done exactly as successfully.

My mischevious mind thinks the result’s are probably better in the less-time-to-get-it-done schedule. More of, “What’s most important?” as the daily/hourly starting point.

But who cares? So what if I remain an unemployed, now what do I do, considering asking for quarters on the corner of 15th and Broadway, abundance of time to hang out with trees and birds, undiscovered treasure trove of heart-mind human service Ch’an cat who’s under-employed mind gets looser and looser each Spring day.

So what?

A guy who was in the rooms when I first set out doing the sober thing was always saying, “I don’t know nothing about nothing.” It took me two years to realize he wasn’t just saying it for laughs, he really meant it about himself. And it took me three more years to realize it wasn’t just him.

I wake each morning in my current state of unemployment with nothing more than a flimsy outline of possible acts, motions, even potions within that day. Yes, there are weekly staples – Tuesday night koan gathering, one of those meetings Saturday mornings. That’s about it. Of course coffee somewhere, like breathing, will happen daily. But, speaking in mathematics here for a sec, as I get up at 4a and mostly slip under the covers just before 9p, that’s 119 waking hours in which to entertain and be entertained.

I sit on the cushion a little over half an hour and write Morning Pages a little under half an hour seven days a week, get on the floor for my knees and hips, so that’s maybe 10 hours, and add Tuesday night zooming in Oakland and Saturday early showing up in Sellwood and coffee shop lingerings and there are about 20 of those 119 sort of spoken for, 100 hovering out in any seven days, peekaboo fairies and elves, whispers and giggles and calls from cuckoos and red-winged blackbirds – “Pick me. Pick me.”

And often, so often, there are mornings like this one where I just don’t have a clue – I hear myself ask out loud, “What am I going to do today?” and hear myself answer, “No clue.” And the to-thine-own-self-be-true self-awareness of that recovering cat back there in Somerville, MA keeps ringing through me. Over and over.

Me and Bob Zimmerman – ‘No direction home.’

What do I need money for beyond the obvious? — peanut butter, coffee, some food, gasoline. I have enough books, and my ragged clothes are exactly the rags the Buddha wore strolling back into the market place, “How can I help?” on his silent lips. There is, I think, a planetary generosity living lean. Me and Henry David. On birthdays I send money to my four grandkids and my son Spenser.

“You may be eloquent as a river tipping steadily over into a falls, but what would all your explanations reveal?” – David Hinton

I’m sitting in a Starbucks in NE (Northeast) writing, thinking this is the first time (within 12-plus PDX years) I’ve written in the NE. Dylan’s on the system singing, “Don’t think twice, it’s alright.” But I have thought twice, and realized that when I first moved to Portland in January ’09 I would walk down Burnside to a Starbucks and write every day, waiting to find a job. And, as Burnside divides SE from NE, and as that Starbucks was on the north side of the street, it turns out I began my Portland life wildly writing in NE.

The idea of symmetry has sat on my mind lots lately.

I was happy with the seven-part story that unfolded here these past seven weekdays, none of which I prepared or expected. It simply fell out. And especially with that most interesting married couple. I guess I’m left with this — It’s good to have spooky friends.

I honestly do not know what I’m going to write and share here at from a mountain bench moving forward. That’s certainly the case today, and wondering about tomorrow, as I’m experiencing an exceptional degree of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion. It’s how it is. To borrow from ‘The Velvets’ — “I could sleep for a thousand years.”

But, I have decided to shave my head. For a couple of reasons: My head was basically shaved when I first arrived in Portland in 2009, and look at all the great stuff that happened then. And, it will be a lighter load to carry around.

Then Weymouth hopped off the stool, dragged it back over to the counter at the no-longer-boarded-up plate-glass. Connie stood, reached for Weymouth’s hand, and they turned and walked back out the coffee shop’s door. That was a week ago Saturday and I haven’t seen them since.

The end.

Back to me — Before this blog space and I came up with the surprising idea to tell a seven-part story there was no married couple named Connie and Weymouth in my life. Not a flicker of recognition. There was, though, one Rennie Lewis in DeLoreal Beach, California – a young private detective with a drinking problem. He of the 30,000-plus words of a very cool novel, nowhere near finished and collecting dust for more than seven years now. I was kind of happy to see the marrieds bringing him up as a get-your-butt-to-the-keyboard example. I don’t know any of those other folks.

I’ll end this week, and this ongoing story, with a couple of facts. Wednesday I celebrated 43 years without a drink or a drug. I did not do this alone, though much of that time has been spent alone. And, when I move the last day of this month I will be moving to my eighth address in these past five years. I say that neither as a plea for help nor as bragging. Just the way it is. Ducks float on the lake in the Rhododendron Garden. I move a lot.

“Try these on for size,” said Weymouth, “maybe crank over those napping brain cells.” —– They took turns:

“It took me a long time to find out about money. You either have it or you don’t. Life goes on. Walk around wearing a smile or become an f’ing whiner. Either way, no one’s just going to give you a winning lottery ticket.”

“Pete Martin was schooling his friend Daryl. ‘Here at the fish house we have a cool way of life. We do what we want. And you can come or you can go, any time you want.’ Daryl let his eyes travel over the rag-tag collection of second-hand couches and old soft chairs. ‘What do you do here?’ he asked. ‘We tell stories, bro,’ Pete answered. ‘That’s all?’ ‘That’s all.’ Pete twisted to look directly, for the first time, at his friend. ‘We tell stories, bro, and then the stories come true.’”

“It’s pretty much tradition in DeLoreal Beach to spend as much time out in the sun as possible, and to build a daily diet around alcohol, coffee, and ice cream. Rennie Lewis had never been much for ice cream. And he looked on coffee primarily as remedy.”

“Sharon Filkins found the duck blind Saturday, on one of her weekly trips out into the marsh. Fortunately, she found no evidence of killing, which was good. She was a pacifist and a lover of animals. She never once saw a duck she didn’t think about cuddling. But the duck blind was here, where she found it, and it for sure wasn’t built to house wayward girls on nature hikes. So, Saturday, that day, she cut some reeds and made a make-shift cushion, sat down with legs crossed and her hands in what’s called the cosmic mudra, and became very still. Thirty minutes later she was clear on what she had to do.”

Silence..

“Yo, sleepy head,” Connie said right at me, looking like the Cheshire Cat. “Where do you think Sharon got the knife to cut the reeds with?” Weymouth spun around on a stool that didn’t spin.

The marrieds sat there, across and above, for the next five minutes, just looking at me.

Weymouth clears his throat, but it’s Connie saying, “Did you hear the one about the guy who strolls into the Monday morning credit union and has his credit card shredded? Because his life is so screwed up?” “Or,” Weymouth says, while sipping some of my half n’ half, “because it’s so wildly together?”

“Well anyway,” Connie says, “it’s just a story going around town. Now, about last night and that cutie pie Weymouth and my lucky, lucky cutie-pied self up all hours ruminating and Contemplating and

• Reflecting
• Pondering
• Meditating
• Deliberating
• Mulling over
• Speculating
• Considering
• Chewing over

      and brooding about how to help and maybe even save your inertia-rized, stuck in the middle, lost in space, ain’t no author here self. Are you interested to hear what all our devotion to the one and only you came up with?”

“Sure,” I say again.

“Sweet,” says Weymouth. “Buckle up.”