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A wonder, hmmm, if there’s been just enough outreach (finding a job) that it’s left to patiently wait, now just wait, a patient lingering on a cusp – one cusp of a zillion between poverty and freedom. Feeling any job at this point – me always with hands open, wearing rags, strolling back into the market place (fine bodhisattva) – any offer as an invite for some interesting journey. The kind of place/space Gretel would be giggling while leading me along.

Maybe it’s sitting on a cornflake. Within the geography of day after day alone on a hill. Nowhere man. 

And…

Seemingly unemployable and everything, I am going to apply for a fellowship. $5000. To subsidize a two-week journey hither and yon, multiple landing spots, during which I will research and begin the devotion to and for a new book – number 13 on my hit parade.

I do not, this morning, know the genre, or even a subject matter, though I have a sense that the luscious realm of magic will play some part.

How could it not, living on a fellowship, and everything?

When the day began, yesterday, there were four possible employment possibilities for me – two I had interviewed for, and two interviews scheduled for the afternoon. By 4:45pm each one had passed by, kaput, and with a later than usual coffee I got to sit in the recliner and wonder about my life and the way the world spins and works its magic. All the Yes’s, all the “No’s.

Earlier this week I shared I had learned my sponsor from ‘those meetings’ had passed away. He was my fourth. Go back to the very beginning, 43 years back, and my first sponsor – a lovely gay man by the name of Dick M – would quite often point out to me, often amidst a slurry of moans and whines from moi, that I was, in fact, “Right where I was supposed to be.” It was comforting then – I knew he’d never put me on – and it’s comforting now.

I don’t know how much, if at all, I live in the world where “things happen for a reason” these days. But, if maybe I peer through and beyond those words, there is something worthy and good there. Spinning world. Moonlit path. Magic magic.

I’m with Annie – It’s a hard knock life.

And still, rapping with Spenser offers heavy encouragement. Which Spenser-talk translates into something like, “Get your butt in gear, Dad.”

It came to me the other morning, on a walk, poor as I am, in need of burrito money, gas money, going to the movies money, insurance money, CD money, used book money, even – perish the thought – Match.com money, that as long as my knees and hips and ankles and these 10 toes still work as well as they do, I get to take these walks. And the experience for me is breathtaking, all of my sense material blown wide open, the day seen from the corners of my vision like beyond what seems possible, with the peripheral. Hearing all of it, feeling the breeze, feeling the bumps in the tar of the streets, long overdue for a brand new coat. Pebbles. Lingering jasmine nose. Chestnuts falling, squirrel tag residue, right past my head. Whoosh.

I told my son Cameron as long as I get to do that, it’s all great. And it’s one reason why I keep adding parameters, perhaps detours, to the work search experience – how many hours, how many days, what the interviews are gonna look like. All of it. Days without a time card. Here is me, perspective employers. Stripped down.

I’m hanging my art in the Starbucks at 15th and Fremont – home away from home – for the month of September. I’m hanging the weirdest pieces, because that’s who and how and why and what I am today. And who knows, maybe on some wild smidge of good fortune someone will offer me money for one of my paintings. Maybe even two.

Maybe Mama knew. I just never seem to.

“The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.” – Lester Bangs

That pretty much says it, me showing up here Mondays through Fridays.

On a recent Facebook post, which included a photo – this photo –

I added a caption – “Sometimes it’s almost hard being this hip,” following a list of songs I was digging on that morning’s stroll – The Pixies, Patti Smith, The Mary Chain.

I did not include the word soulful, though I could have. There was no mention of cool.

Saturday morning I glanced at the time on the microwave, 10:07, and I knew in my heart that if there were 138 hours in this Saturday it would not nearly be enough time to do all the things calling me, invitations for which I had serious emotional devotions. Stuff I really, really wanted to do. Including relatively brief periods of heavy goofing off, which weren’t so brief after all.

I thought of my life as unknowable, out there on the porch with three of the five books I have going, nevermind the scads of Chan Koan literature piled in piles on the small blue fetched-off-a-sidewalk table beside the recliner. Even there – with coffee, with Morning Pages, with last night’s box scores and the endless dreaming for a girl I haven’t met – I can’t say how, as well as who, I am. Through the looking glass of I do not am.

Last weekend a long distance friend called from Massachusetts to let me know my sponsor had died. He from ‘those meetings.’ I felt some of the breath leave my already all-alone self. Further emptiness. The planet sighed.Then, just Friday, one of my subscribers here sent me $50, she said, without speaking, so as to keep on keeping on. Right there, a bit less broke, blood tests all to the good, just another comic superhero – Iron Elder. 

A ratatouille.

And after all this, here Friday morning, the heat wave winding down, the sky clearing back to blue, the fragrance and deadliness of wild fire smoke blowing east, my fingertips beginning the slow ache of landing on six electric guitar strings for the first time in about forever, something of a ‘Google Meet’ phone interview set for nine Monday morning, a splurge for new postal stamps and subsequent well wishes into the wind, baby-step preparations for some of my art hanging in my Starbucks for the month of September, one amazing talk after another with my son Cameron, fly-away thoughts about San Luis Obispo and Ocean Beach the last few days, lounging off and on in the front porch rockable chairs courtesy of the landlords off to Lake Tahoe for five weeks, lost in books out from little libraries, being practiced by my practice, helping to maintain the cost of living in countries that grow coffee, feeling jealous vibes every time I walk past my car, maintaining heavy friendships with neighborhood crows and white moth-like butterflies, and now…..

off for two days.

So, every time I hit ‘Publish’ here, and a today’s post flies into your home, it’s like the curtain going up. On the movie of me. And when “I do not think, therefore I do not am,” it’s the curtain going up on ‘just this.’

It’s kind of like the B52’s singing, “Dance This Mess Around.” Right. This mess. Where ‘mess’ may conjure up some particular image. Then again, how about The Beach Boys’ “You Need a Mess of Help To Stand Alone?” That ‘mess.’ Or, in a life not remembered, sitting around a campfire, cook yells, ‘mess.’ Yet another ringing bell in this life. Come and get it.

The singer Donovan, a very cool cat, sang, “First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.” Perhaps things aren’t what they seem. And wasn’t it Stan who said, “We’ve made a fine mess of things this time, haven’t we, Ollie.”

Somehow, in the move from an attic on SE Cesar Chavez to a basement on NE 16th, I lost a beloved small statue of the Buddha and a complete sheet of 20 postal stamps.

Curtain time. What a mess.

Not feeling great (physically), alone and broke, do not am(ing) all over the place, not a single idea for a Wednesday post, and this shows up.

Cameron, on the left, driving his mother who was visiting in Montana over to her other son Spenser, on the right, way over on the western border of Idaho. Cameron calls Monday afternoon to tell me he’s with Spenser – which happens as often as Haley’s Comet – and I say, “Please take a picture,” and he says for sure, and at some point yesterday afternoon I remember and realize I didn’t get it, they must have forgot, and at 7:45 last night it appears, as if by some magic, in the ‘message’ box.

And I’d been feeling there was nothing to say.