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And

Last night about 10,000 raccoons gathered outside and below my window for a game of ring-around-the-rosy. I almost wrote 10,000 dragons, but that would be silly. I knew they were raccoons.

I’m not trying to win any popularity contest.

Later yesterday afternoon I found myself carelessly wandering through 1000 blades of tall, green grass at the outskirts of water-logged Laguna Lake. Much to my surprise, and joy, I saw the cows had returned, grazing by the path up to San Luis Mountain, way, way over there. Of course they saw me too – it’s like looking in a mirror.

The clouds and bright sky and brilliant, emeral hills were wild.

I had a post for today waiting here from last weekend, but I threw it out a few minutes ago. This is way more now. That previous post did include a song, so I’ll tack on a different one here – my all-time favorite singer.

Thanks for participating.

On the return half of a Friday morning hike on the Bob Jones Trail, snuck in between the rains, this thought settled entirely within my January 19, 1949 essence – I am utterly clueless about every bit of my life now. Right here, then and there, on the trail. The gathering of ancient Coast Live Oaks shimmering their total understanding in the southwesterly breeze. I don’t have a clue – not the tiniest morsel of a clue – regards (ing) any single possibility of a ‘What now? What’s next?’

I think I’ve been leaning into this, hinting to myself, in my writings, here in the blog with some of my posts the last month or so. Trailing my own personal crumbs Gretel has been tossing about along the way – I may be moving, my housemate’s wildly unpredictable, I don’t want a job, I’m so alone and yet feel disconnected from everyone, I feel like I’ve always lived here, that I’ve come home, and Encinitas and Oakland are on my mind.

I miss sitting on the sea wall at Ocean Beach in San Diego. I miss walking the Cape Cod Rail Trail in Orleans, Massachusetts. I miss sacred time on the bench in the Rhody Garden in Portland, Oregon.

And I have no plan at all – which was the subtle zap walking the Bob Jones the end of last week. None of this is ‘poor me,’ and if it reads that way, I apologize. I tend to tell it like it (me) is – previously on surfed couches, now from a mountain bench. And this is like it is. I’m just so utterly clueless about my life.

It’s not scary. I don’t think it’s bad. It’s just how I am.

A Japanese woman came into the coffee shop the afternoon before next year. She was wearing a shiny gray rain hat. With napkins she polished the family table and her own chair almost endlessly. She bought and brought her son coffee shop eggs, and shared a homemade, out of her bag, thick, steamy drink with the man, perhaps her husband, though she wore no wedding ring.

The coffee shop on the afternoon before next year was filled with happy and grumpy people. Many of the men had beards.

As I was preparing to leave, one of my favorite baristas, who I almost never see, appeared behind the counter. Holly. Also, while preparing to leave, the Japanese woman with the shiny gray rain hat and no wedding ring, stood and walked directly to my table.

“Don’t prepare the room,” she said to me.

I went with my book and pencil and glasses and said “Happy New Year” to China and Isiah and Holly, and I left.

It’s interesting. Coming back on the Bob Jones Trail I see a slightly-larger-than-half moon just above the tree line of the hill that holds my all-by-itself tree. (The one I bow to.) The path takes me away from the view of the moon, but as I move around the corner and uphill, the moon is there, high in the sky, the tree high on the hill, and this is my Koan, which begins, “A solitary boat without oars making its way in the moonlight.”

Which is no other than me, in this very life now – a solitary boat without oars making its way in the moonlight. Home. Yet, four hours later when I don’t get tagged to speak at one of those meetings – and not tagged for the second week in a row – I realize how disconnected I am from these people, like barely an after thought, and the question flashes – “Why is that?” The question maybe hoping I’ll beat myself up, the “without oars” more than some romantic poetry.

And I don’t know if I beat myself up or not, because on the way out a woman chases me down and says she wants one of my books, she’ll pay, and I go to my car and bring one back, it’s free I say, and she says, “We have to get coffee sometime,” her and her partner Rick and me, and I say I’d like that because for six months I’ve suggested we all get coffee and I’ve never heard from them.

Maybe the question “Who’s fault is that?” floats by, but I get in the car and turn on the radio and forget it. I don’t notice, driving up Higuera, no doubt the moonlight slips into the passenger seat and rides along with me. Digging the beat. It’s easy to dance to.

Morning Pages, Monday 12/29, influenced directly reading snippets of John Tarrant’s “Bring Me the Rhinocerous:”

“Apparently there are so many things to read I can find nothing to read. Like the sand-raked patterns of the Japanese Garden in Portland. Unexplainable and perfect.

Like the blue jay flying across the Bob Jones Trail and lighting on a branch in a close-by tree. Nothing but blue. The whole universe, blue. No sorrow, no mischevious thinking, no music from the picnic place. No renewing the driver’s license, and feeling so alone. No Starbucks, no crazy people, no picture of my boys in my wallet. No polar cold fronts and no boogie boarding. No oil change. No late or on time for the meditation group. Just blue.

Even the screech of the jay sounds blue. My ears may have turned blue. And that’s just 10 steps on the path. I can’t possibly imagine what the next half hour has planned.

Now, in this place, I hear the 6:11 Surfliner whistle in the distance. While my mind hums “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” And a permission comes to wonder this – Do blue jays get cold?”

Here’s my New Year’s fantasy. Wait! That’s what they call them, right? New Year’s fantasies?

Anyway, my New Year’s fantasy is to discover and attract into my life a stream of income which does not involve a job, a schedule, bosses, travel, and all that employment jazz.

To be clear, I have a job now and I like my bosses and the job has real cool opportunities to be kind and goofy and welcoming, groovy even.

But it’s a job, with bosses and schedules and time cards and a uniform, and if the creek don’t rise, in a few weeks I’ll turn 77 and venture out into my 78th year on this green and blue spinning planet. The one bubbling with joy and wonder if you look around.

And if it’s all the same to dragonflies and my kids and ancient masters and favorite baristas and past and future girlfriends, I’d very much like the ‘Path of 78′ to be employment free.

Dig it?

It’s my New Year’s fantasy. And, see! See! I could sit around all day long and listen to this. Wicked, wicked Yay!!!

“Lines form on my face and hands.” – Alice Cooper, ‘Eighteen’

In April of 1973 the legal drinking age in Massachusetts was lowered from 21 to 18. By then I was 24, and had been drinking since I was 16, but I was happy because it was cool. It was the right thing. ‘Bout time.

Back then I was a “student” at Salem State College, returned from dropping out and enrolled in the new Social Welfare major. I was on the staff of the college newspaper, “The Log,” and was very devoted to that journalism side of college life. Going to classes? Not so much.

Anyway, the night the new ’18’ law went into effect I made a not at all unusual appearance at one of my two favorite bars on Derby Street – ‘In a Pig’s Eye.’ You know, to celebrate with the kids. Someone snapped a photo. This one:

The next day or one of the days close after I wrote a feature story for The Log, about the festivities and all the goodness as a result . I noted that this bar, just down the street from my apartment, was “within crawling distance.” The article was titled – “I’m 18, I get confused every day.” Yup, another line from Mr. Cooper’s song.

One of the electives I’d taken within the Social Welfare curriculum was ‘Alcohol and Alcoholism.’ You know, skate through three credits, race toward that ole diploma. My next class I walked in a bit early and the teacher looked at me and said he’d read my article. He said he’d enjoyed it. He said all this with something of a grin on his face, and about 20 years later the light in my head flashed on and it came to me the grin belonged to a Cheshire Cat. An “I know something you don’t know,” grin.

Geez, Professor. It only took 10 more years to start figuring it out. Like the song says – “I got a baby’s brain and an old man’s heart.”

I’m happy to report that nearly all of the posts here in this blog show up on their own. There’s nothing, and then there’s something. Last Friday, ‘JoJo Rabbit,’ a few days before, ‘Linda Eastman McCartney.’ Possibly (a tomorrow) the airing out of the song “I Belong to the Blank Generation” by Richard Hell and the Voidoids, where “Blank” is brimming with life, and the stars in the sky maintain their silence. You should hear them at 4am.

Like yesterday’s photo of so many painted kitties. The kitty on the left – “Donnie’s Cat” – my attempt at ‘Figurative,’ done from a photo I took when I was crashing for free in Donnie’s spare bedroom one of the times my life was falling apart. It was maybe 1986. Donnie now with alzheimer’s, the cat likely long gone, me left here to write this stuff.

As I type, these words from a Zen Master filling the vacuum of my mind – “That’ll do, pig. That’ll do.”

Those are my paintings, and that’s a mom and daughter, both of whom I befriended in a way – the mom with some phone calls, the daughter a time or two meeting for coffee. I don’t remember their names this Monday, it was Portland, Oregon when I was married and painting in that studio in the background, much of its walls and floors and ceilings painted by me as it transitioned from a rented-living space to an art studio for my then-wife and her daughter and me.

I have something of a vague sense that my phone calls and coffee shop meeting(s) were of a helping nature – like I was trying to be helpful in some way(s). It may have been a deep depression with the daughter, the weary living of life’s tangles for the mom. I think that’s close to it.

The painting on the left – titled ‘Donnie’s Cat’ – was actually a sheet of canvas. On the right – I’ll call it ‘Kitties’ now – a regular stretched canvas, looks like a 20 x 24. I sold one for $25 and gave the other as a gift, thankful to those who support local artists.

These are something like memories, from the corner of my mind. It makes me happy they’re both smiling there and then.