I love the Winter Woods

Summer Remembered

Seeds of this season have long been sown. Now the fragile plants of May are tall and fruitful and groaning for harvest. The season has been good, bright and warm mostly. Still the days have passed with enough rain to let the little green seedling mature to tall and dusky and ripe plants. Late September grasses blow in the mild winds. Apple trees are weighted down with their sweet fruits. Harvest is due.

Nature's palate takes a turn right here, right now. Where once a thousand nuanced shades of green spread out across the horizon, now flames of orange and red have begun to spread. Red, orange, yellow and dark almost purple colors are emerging from the canopy of leaves that line the roads I walk. It is a riot of rich, rich color. Both celebration of and elegiac of one good season they please the senses.

In walking cascading thoughts as to beauty, trust, truth, motivation, desire, hope, love; well they all rush through the brain. Me I keep returning to the idea of the meaning of beauty. What does it mean to call something beautiful?  What do I mean when I call someone beautiful?

Beauty is something true, at least that is what I think when I ruminate upon it.  Beauty means that the thing called beautiful is so true as to be pleasing to the mind, the eye, the ear, the heart and well to almost any of the senses.  True beauty is something not just surface, not just ephemeral.  Beauty is a construct of the thing’s essence.

When I call someone beautiful I am not talking about a physical form I am talking about their spirit.  Beauty is a heart seeking to become all that it has any right to be on God’s green earth.  Therein lays beauty, in a spirit’s search for the real.  With true beauty can come love.

Love arises slowly, grows into a blaze and then settles into a warming fire. Love’s embers can linger for a lifetime. The trick is learning to discern the difference between the start of love and the start of lust. I think you catch the difference in the glimmer of an eye, in the tone with which a word is spoken and in the way a phrase is laid out.

Lust can arise quite quickly. Normally it will pass like the summer rain. Heated passions arise in a moment but in the end they leave not a trace. Like a shooting star they can neither be contained nor caught. In the end having experienced lust a few times I have learned that you don't cling to passing moods.

Writers may speak only through the world of letters but their words can be infused with carefully turned and meaningful phrases.  The way in which particular writer speaks is a viewing point into a human heart.  With each word a writer puts down love may grow.  Seeds planted with words can envelop the heart like a canopy of bright fall leaves.  Beauty leads to love.  Love leads to awareness.

The Joy of CSN & Y

Somewhere in 1967 I started listening to FM radio.  1967 & 1968 were the heady days when FM was outlaw radio.  DJs played what they wanted, when they wanted.  This special moment on the airwaves allowed the Chambers Brothers to be matched up with Muddy Waters and the Nice.  It was the era of smoking a joint before heading off your first class at 8:30 in the a.m.  It was fringed leather jackets and long hair, back when long hair meant something. 

8 track tapes played in 1963 Chevy Impalas. As you were driving around back country farm roads everyone was listening to Led Zepplin or Yes cranked up to the highest volume possible.  Each month it seemed car radios improved.  Every time the radio got better somebody bought one and dropped in their cars.  Guys carved out holes in the space between the back seat and the trunk and dropped the biggest bad assed speakers they could find into those slots.  I remember one guy just mounted a set of full sized component stereo speakers into his back seat.

There in the midst of a time where music was political as it has not been in many years. Narrow was the window when who you listened to said so much about who you were. Right that in those few days when music was politics suddenly there dropped an LP like none other I had ever heard.  In March of 1970 Crosby, Still, Nash and Young released Déjà Vu. The sound of that record was seismic in its impact of the listener and on what would happen in the years that followed.

The album opened with Stephen Stills anthem “Carry On.” A sampling of the lyrics shows the urgency with which the album was bursting:

Carry on, love is coming, love is coming to us all.

Where are you going now my love? Where will you be tomorrow?

Will you bring me happiness? Will you bring me sorrow?

Oh, the questions of a thousand dreams, what you do and what you see,

Lover, can you talk to me?

Every lyric, every line was vivid and conveyed stories that were layered and to which you could craft a relationship with your own life.  But it wasn’t the lyrics, it was the sound.  Bill Halverson and Wally Heider Studio #3 provided the genesis for a wave of multi tracked harmonies as nuanced and beautiful as anything that had every come before.  It wasn’t just a quartet layered and layered atop itself into a perfect blend of harmonies.  Those voices lay atop the roughest meanest guitars slingers about, and yes I mean Stephen Stills and Neil Young. Neil’s and Stephen’s licks were transcendent.

Driving the back roads that summer we had the eight track blasting Woodstock at top volume.  Drinking little Rolling Rock ponies and smoking $40 an ounce Columbian weed we learned every single lyric to every single song.  Hey as the years went on Humble Pie, Alice Cooper and the Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers got played to death too.  But nothing sounded like that CSN & Y tape.  It was in a class all by itself.  Its tales took you to places, to Woodstock, to North Ontario and wherever else a vaguely country motif might lead.  Hell we all wanted to get back to the earth; we all wanted to get back to the country once we heard that record.

Memory of a Summer Girl

The death of David Bowie has taken me back to the time when I first heard his music.  It was in an ice cream store on the boardwalk.  What days those were.  Sad thing I did not realize how special they were.

What could I possibly remember from those hot summer days I lived so many seasons ago?  All human memory fades with time.   True memory even in the strictest mental disciplinarian's reckoning is elusive.   Memories become coated with a patina that imparts romanticism and mutes the past hours' reality with overtones of nostalgia and warmth.

Thinking on the passage of time it is nigh onto 33 years since my eyes first scanned her form, that coworker who would be my first love.  At our first meeting I did not realize she would be the first true love of my life.   How could I have known as my myopic eyes ran up and down her supple body that what I would eventually feel for her would be the measure against which all other romantic interludes of my life would be weighed? 

1974 was the year and the Imperial Presidency of Richard M. Nixon was about to end.  (Do you remember dear reader those funny euro-empire style uniforms Tricky Dick  made the White House guards wear for a time; the yellow ones with the epaulets and the feathered plumes?)   I digress.  It was 1974 and I was 18 years of age, legal to vote, legal to drink and ready to leave the nest.   Summer was upon me and once again I was at the beach.

My first real beach job had come to me through the intervention of my cousin.  Initially I was to take a job with him full time as a salesman at his card store.   However over the winter things as they say had changed.  During the winter my cousin had begun playing hide the salami with a young lass on a regular basis.    So as to insure his ready access to the preferred silo for his moisture missile he needed her to have a reason to be at the beach, and thus my job vanished.   She got the salesclerk's post and I was offloaded on a business friend of cousin a short Jewish gentleman named Phil.   Where was I to work, well at an ice cream stand named Kurly Kustard.

I don't remember our introduction, but I know it was in the small front space of that purveyor of soft serve extraordinaire Kurly Kustard.  The first real memory I have of her was during the distribution of the cups.  I think we were given a choice of four cups between the four of us employees.   Cocaine, Heroin, Morphine and Opium, these words were baked in black letters in script reminiscent of Edward Gorey's pen on ivory white coffee mugs.    I believe she picked first and took Heroin.  I took to the best of my recollection Opium.  Having your boss give she a cup with a scheduled drug emblazoned on it was not so strange in the 1970s.   Now if an employer were to do that, especially an employer of teens, he would probably be facing charges.

Uncle Philsy was no fool.  The cups were a clever ploy on his part to keep his costs down and his profits up.   The rule was that you could eat all she wanted of anything in the store, except for individually wrapped novelty items, but you had to use your assigned cup.   Paper cups were counted as inventory control and thus were not to be used.   To a teenager these initially seemed like heaven.  The promise of milkshakes and ice cream, nuts and syrup; what a deal this was.    Mr. B. as we called him knew what he was doing, cagey and crafty man that he was.  A mere two days of gorging on milk fat rich treats would devastate even the hardiest of youthful GI systems.    Explosive diarrhea, vicious cramps and gas pains so strong they would double you over were the inevitable, the near certain results of such gorging.   The nausea and the pain were memories that would seem to last a life time, but surely they would last a summer.  As a result the ice cream and treats were safe.  We ate sparingly.

Standing there petite and beautiful, she held her cup, Heroin.  She had the vibrancy and radiance of youthful beauty, but the word in her hand was the hardest of the hard.   Little didn't I realize that the cup she held was a metaphor for what she would become to me.

My memory now is that encounter with her was visceral, sensual, and electric.  Her long brown hair, curly from the humidity, was bouncing in the cooling breeze from off the Atlantic's waters.   Her skin tight jeans clung to her shapely ass.  And as always she wore those clingy rippled sort of tube tops, mostly in earth tones that barely concealed her breasts.   But it was the bandana and the glasses that I remember most despite what the first part of this paragraph might imply.

With her hair pulled back and with those aviator style glass frames, her face's beauty was clear, her smooth skin tanned and brown and those full lips captured my eye.   And the things that rolled off her tongue, the way she said them, just amazed me.  Her glasses and hair gave her a look of constant forward motion.   Her whole facial countenance seemed to imply a life being lived with a vibrant spark.   She may have been conveyed by a motorcycle, an open cockpit plane or a surfboard, but her trajectory was always forward and fast and wonder filled.

Why I Blog

It was about a decade maybe fifteen years ago that I decided I had to do something to capture what was within me.  I was feeling shackled by a variety of roles that seemed to be stealing away pieces of my soul. Watching little and big pieces of my life disappear scared me.

Ultimately I had to create a space where I could think out loud (but not where others could hear me) and where I could capture the memories of whom I was.  When I was still with working at a private practice law firm 16 years ago I wrote a couple of long pieces dealing with frustration and personal disquiet. Somewhere I still have them saved on floppy discs.  When I left private practice law was a period of grace when I felt okay and the turmoil seemed to abate. Nothing went down on paper during that time.

Eventually the questions started to crop up again.  Me I have always struggled with questions of meaning and ethics.  Nagging questions sent me down what a great number of people would think was an endless rabbit hole of reading philosophy.  Immersing my mind in Spinoza and others I mulled the meaning of life, love, marriage, trust and honor.  Little kernels that I would glean from their works would sit in the back of my mind. When I was struggling with things like my son’s diagnosis with Aspergers, my cancer and some other primal issues my feelings flowed out onto electronic paper.

One day as I was telling probably my rudest but humorous true sexual story to a couple of my barista friends at the coffee shop I used to call my second home a third party suggested I write a blog.  In March 2008 I started writing.  I have slowed my production at times but I have never stopped.  I also started using little notebooks to record some ideas to work into posts.  In doing this I was able to open up things I kept bottled up inside for a long, long time. Joni Mitchell kind of captured what was the disquiet that motivated me.

Joni Mitchell - Hejira Lyrics

 

I'm traveling in some vehicle

I'm sitting in some cafe

A defector from these petty wars

That shell shock love away

 

There's comfort in melancholy

When there's no need to explain

It's just as natural as the weather

In this moody sky today

 

In our possessive coupling

So much cannot be expressed

So now I'm returning to myself

These things that you and I suppressed

 

I see something of myself in everyone

Right at this moment of the world

As snow gathers like bolts of lace

Waltzing on a bridal girl

 

You know it never has been easy

Whether you do or you do not resign

Whether you travel the breadth of extremities

Or you stick to some straighter line

 

I would suggest to you (that is anyone who might be reading this) that you create some time to use your words to suss out different challenges and feelings that you are working through.  Me I have a Gmail account where I send only fragments of what is crossing my mind.  Maybe a sentence seems to work and I think I could use it later. Maybe I have a little thought that becomes a paragraph but there is not enough to create a piece of 250, 500 or 750 words.  So I capture it and fire it off and come back to it later.

Here is a plan of action for you dear reader. Create an electronic space for nothing other than collecting drafts or for writing out you gut’s most innermost feelings.  Then start using it.  Open it and write.

In the darkness and pain of solitude we have to work out our own salvation my friend.

Aftermath Assessment

February is relentlessly dark in this northern town.  Grey skies intermittently spit snow. Arctic cold fronts spew horribly strong winds at bitterly numbing temperatures. In this cold city you need to know where the warm places are. This taproom was one of the warmest and most welcoming he knew.

In the middle of the block, on a thoroughfare not yet totally gentrified, stands the Bedford Arms Ballroom. “Ballroom” is a misnomer; the place was a tavern of the highest order plain and simple. Three stories tall the first two floors of this public house are spacious.  Often crowded with bodies once in the Bedford you never noticed the cold once inside.

Interlaced bricks precisely aligned facing forward. The façade is elegant. Traditional Ontario yellow bricks line up row upon row. Even viewed from across the busy thoroughfare which abuts the Bedford, you can clearly see the tap was constructed in the mid-1800s. An elegant dowager the Bedford is a clear presence on a street that had grown to become one of the city’s main thoroughfares.

Dark grey smoked windows face the street bearing the stylized name, “Bedford Arms.” Emblazoned on the glass and writ large each letter is crafted with all the curlicues and extra strokes needed to show a real connection to the gilded age.  Smell of beer poured, stored and soaked from spills into the oak floors mingle with the scents of stews and curries. The place carries itself with a frayed elegance and joie de vivre.

The Bedford stays busy.  14 taps of microbrews bring in the crowds.  10 pool tables up a half flight of stairs behind the bar, in a space edged with an ornate wood railing also help.  But maybe it is the plentiful co-eds from the university across the avenue who act as honey for the prowling men beasts that keep the place so lively.  Maybe all of the above coupled with the pub’s good and fairly priced food is why the public rooms are most always packed.  Two dollars and some change still buys a cup of decent meaty chili here.

Wearing their workday suits ties loosed the duo had talked out all their business and most of their small talk at the bar. Feet on the rail among the bustle and boisterousness of a Thursday night student bar night the conversation had gone one for better than an hour.  Around them and appreciated by them as eye candy groups of twenty-somethings from the university hung in the front rooms. The Bedford is nothing if not a meat market.  In fashions de jour with au courant styled coifs the youth quipped and parried. These sexually charged bar denizens ran their well-polished lines and stratagems on members of the opposite sex (mostly).  Each and every one of them was doing their best to not be alone in the sheets in a frigid student flat come morning light.

Watching the goings on, and occasionally affixing a label to one of the cons being played out by some studly young man on some buxom lass, the pair had talked to an end every single bit of their business.  Settling up for their bar tab, they had consumed a couple flights of microbrews and some bruschetta, the two ordered some very old scotch neat and carried it back to a very small room.

Having been around so long the taproom had been tweaked many times over the years.  In the back a warren of small rooms had been added to allow for small groups to conduct their private business in a quieter environment. They picked one of the smallest rooms probably because the chairs were soft and were almost certainly calling their names. A small gas fireplace was in the center of the room.  The fire within was warm and welcoming.

Tonight’s evening was clearly near an end.  They sat in those overstuffed chairs and enjoyed their drinks. Last call was imminent but probably didn’t matter. Contrary to a student’s routine of drinking the good booze first and then shifting to the cheap shit (when taste didn’t really matter but the buzz did), these two old friends were drinking the superior stuff at the end. Good scotch was their dessert. 

The room in which they found themselves had flocked dark wallpaper, it was a small cozy space.  You could barely hear the clack of pool balls from the adjoining suite. Sipping Lagavulin and savoring the smoky peat taste of the Islay they both seemed to be looking away from the current moment into a point miles beyond.  He had always loved these moments spent at the end of a day with a dear friend. It was one of the true joys of growing older.

All night despite the jokes and jibes he had sensed an undercurrent of discomfort.  The older man had tried to fathom out what was the concern hidden in the background.  Years before when he had first started out in the trade his boss had offered a maxim about what caused things to get troubled, to go sideways as it were.  “Booze, babes or bets, these cause all our troubles.” 

When you adapted his old Cro-Magnon’s master’s sexist term “babes” into a gender neutral noun the adage seemed to hold true even in this much changed world. He senses one of these might be in play. Troubling him was the absence of clues from which to make a guess as to which one exactly.  In the public room the conversation was strictly tied to the business at hand.  Maybe now that they were out of the public eye, something would shake loose.

When the liquor was seeping into their systems the darkened room’s flickering fireplace light had the effect he had hoped for.  His younger friend had finally let go. The younger man had held his turmoil tight within a gripped hand.  How did the phrase float out?  “Have you ever been tempted?” or was it “You have been married for a long time was there ever a time you felt that it wasn’t enough.”  Both meant the same thing. Right now the person sitting in the other chair was on a boundary line. He was trying to decide if putting a pinky, a mere pinky, on the “other” side of the border was going to be a problem.  Was it going to be the marital equivalent of the shooting of Archduke Franz Ferdinand or was it somehow permissible by the unwritten rules of social convention? To the entire outside world the younger man and his wife had a most stable loving relationship.

Hearing his younger friend’s query he understood what was in play quite clearly.  His friend was conducting a risk assessment. He knew that for some that stroll outside the garden wall was a one way walk into a completely different world.  Consequences could follow that would be really, really quite serious.  Some poor souls merely opened the gate and the whole shebang just came tumbling down. On the other hand some people just floated over the fence and back keeping their mouths shut and never being discovered. 

The older man had been to that border himself but he didn’t talk about it much.  He knew both the costs and the reasons for being there at the edge.  Sometimes salt loses its flavor.  Sometimes the light dims in the world two people occupy.  Sometimes the joint ride that is marriage becomes so repetitive that your soul seems to be weighed down.  Some have described the emotional state they moved you to the edge as drowning. 

He knew well other things can turn a head.  Sometimes it is just that sparks fly when you move into the orbit of a firebrand. Sometimes it is just fucking bug lust when both of you know it is wrong. Hell maybe that other person will know a new trick that when executed will cross your eyes and cause the beads of perspiration to roll.  A well placed tongue has been known to make that edge of accepted life downright porous.

To craft a response to his friend wasn’t easy.  No two cases are alike.  Each dalliance carries the promise of joy but all carry with them the seeds of potential destruction.

He looked at the face in the chair beside him, “You know these lives we live are built on sand nothing more and nothing less.  Our worlds are quite fragile things really.  Our day to day life is gossamer illusion.  From the day they teach us to keep score we build worlds that we share with others stacking expected experiences on each other  brick upon brick. We move forward checking the “to dos” off a master list, job, marriage, car, kids, vacation home and so on.”

“Still those who share our path be it spouse or a child they are never really part of us.  While not us they are woven into our lives like part of a fine silk brocade.  But pierce that fine illusion with a harsh action or pull on a silk thread with some jagged reality and it all falls apart. What remains is not very pretty. In that we are dealing with human beings there isn’t physical wreckage on the ground, instead there is pain, deep dark pain.”

He continued, “Somewhere long ago you realized that you had a soul.  You became aware that you wanted to craft something out of the time you have between the forceps and the stone.  Maybe the path was easy for you at first, or so it seemed.  But one day you opened your eyes and you realized that some part of your soul had been caged.  And suddenly you also realized that the time flying by was no longer your friend.  Right then you knew something had to change and mentally you began to walk to the edge of your known world.  Suddenly there is danger.  Suddenly there is passion.  Suddenly everything is hard to understand or contain. Scary isn’t it?”

Stopping he sipped the old ancient scotch whiskey.  He needed to decide where to take this next.  What words would be the right words in this situation? His experience wouldn’t be everyone’s experience.  His choices would not be the right choices for two out of three people. Looking into the fire through the amber whisky in his glass he knew why this place would always be part of his memories.  It gave you space to think. 

Resting the whisky on the chairs arm he began to speak again.  “I have reached that point in my life where stoicism makes sense to me.  Trust me I still would love to have the taste of new pussy on my tongue.  Hell I am sure there is someone out there that could fuck these old bones in a way that would send shivers to places I have forgotten I have.  Also I have heard there is no longer hair down there. But to what end?  Life is very short all in all and the choices we make don’t make a bit of difference in the grand cosmic scheme of things.  I am almost certain that humanity will die out and we will leave this third rock from the sun quite barren, perhaps sooner than later.”

“What I am saying is that all we have is our actions to measure our worth against. It might not mean much in the end but it is something.  Who we have treated ill means something to our souls in the end.  What goals we have chased also means something in the end. I guess what I am saying is that you have to look inside and see who you. You then got to consider the cost of your next step to your soul.”’

His friend looked at him in a questioning manner.  The question even in this dark light was clear what have you done in this situation? Again his answer had to be carefully crafted and offered.

A little more whiskey would be needed before he spoke.  Had it been any other friend he might have lied.  But they had seen too much together.  They had worked hard together. They had cried together.  They had opened their souls to each other.  This one required truth but a careful truth.

“Did you ever listen to Dylan while you were at university?” He posed the question without making eye contact.  “Bobby Dylan was a whole bunch of things to a whole bunch of people but at the very minimum he was an amazing poet.  So many of his words are like little totally on-point haiku.  If you listen carefully you can work ‘em around in your mind.  One lyric that always has stayed with me was from his song Dirge.  The words go, ‘I went out on Lower Broadway and I felt that place within, that hollow place where martyrs weep and angels play with sin.’  Having an affair is something that.  An affair can leave ashes and carnage all over the place.  The aftermath can be a hollow place of weeping when the sin of the angle is discovered”

Stroking his near empty glass he continued, “But oh there are times when our bodies and minds ache for something.  Even if everything in our lives seems fine things just happen. From out of nowhere unexpected and unanticipated sparks arise.  Suddenly there comes electricity, compulsion, desire, passion and those most basic urges. In fever heat these drive us to moments where despite our logical brain screaming “no, no, no,” we cross the line.  Our better angels are almost inexorably drawn to “play with sin”. It can come on like a gale from out of nowhere washing over us causing turmoil and danger only to be gone a few moments later.  On the other hand it can be a sustained blow that we cannot resist or avoid.”

The gas fireplace’s glow gave him focus.  The warmth was comforting. He mused a bit and then realized that his glass was empty.  He spied a side table and he walked over to it and put the glass down.  Returning to his chair he rested on the arm and looked at his friend.  His friend’s head was pointed down gazing into the fire.  The light in the room flickered golden.

Quietly he spoke, “No matter what you do here you are not the first to travel this path.  But please know there are consequences.  If you are discovered you marriage, your life, your finances and the lives of you children and spouse will be about as upset as any apple cart can be.  You if found out will never be able to put the world you live in now back together.”

 He gazed at his friend. Well he actually gazed at his friend’s hairline because that head had remained fixed forward looking far and away into the light. It had barely moved the entire time he was speaking. He straightened up a bit and let a little air escape over his lips.  He in the softest of tones proceeded, “But even if you are not discovered and you do everything right in carrying on this assignation there are consequences. I mean even assuming there are no stray scents or hairs to give you away you will be changed.  Even if there are no photos ever taken your personality will be amended.  One can only hope you will never run into mutual friends of your spouse leaving the place of your tryst.  But even if the affair is short lived and never discovered there will be a change in you, in your soul or heart.”

“Keith Richard has the lyric for this one, ‘faith has been broken; it is a dull aching pain’.  His friend shifted in the chair but the speaker did not dare make eye contact because he did not want to chance that his friend might be able to see what was churning in his own soul right now.  “You will be different when it is done.  You may have longing and loss.  The flame that you fanned may leave an empty space in your soul that will forever change your relationship with those around you. Melancholy is close but it is not the right word.”

He looked down and then said, “You may feel dirty afterward, like you have gotten away with something and it may nag at you for years.  But then again, maybe not. For some people a clandestine coupling is a release, a satisfaction of a need or a culmination that acts a reaffirmation of who they are.  If both parties know the rules this is possible. Hell maybe you will even find your true soul mate although I doubt that.”

Having looked over at his empty glass and feeling the glow of the scotch fading he contemplated one more drink and then decided against it.  “My friend the path you are travelling is well worn ground.  Think about what you get out of this carefully. Weigh the risks.  The path you take is yours alone.”  With that he grew quiet and his mind wandered to a place where the scent of Opium perfume mixed with the aroma one smells in passionate moments.  In his mind’s eye the autumn light threw a warm glow on the naked full form of a beautiful woman not his wife.  There in that image she was clutching a sheet so as to cover most of her form save her right breast. Catching his gaze she smiled at him. And just as quickly the image was gone.

His friend never returned to the subject.  There were no follow up questions. Instead they talked a little bit more about banal things such as the likelihood of getting a cab at this hour and whether the snow might have stopped.  But no real conversation followed his soliloquy.  And with that last call having now passed the lights came up and they shuffled to the entranceway and departed.

 On the ride home that night he would return to the image of the woman in the sheets more than once.  And when the melancholy began to fill his heart he would look out the cab window and let the street scenes distract him.

Paradigm Shift

When I was in college I read a book about the nature of scientific revolution. It was Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolution. About the only thing I remember of it was the broad concept of paradigm shift. In order to phrase it correctly, or maybe in order to explain it in manner that exceeds my limited capability I cribbed this from the Wiki world…

“A scientific revolution occurs, according to Kuhn, when scientists encounter anomalies which cannot be explained by the universally accepted paradigm within which scientific progress has thereto been made. The paradigm, in Kuhn's view, is not simply the current theory, but the entire worldview in which it exists, and all of the implications which come with it.”

A shift in the worldview… Okay my wife is editing her Facebook page. I am editing my blog. I am scanning other blogs and reading headlines from various newspapers around the world. My kids are finishing watching a TV show on an internet site. This is the new world. The time of access to information from sources like print and television, with pretty well defined internal structures is gone. 

 The three big networks with their news divisions have been rendered irrelevant. The morning and evening newspaper battle has been exploded by Twitter, and twenty other apps. The telephone is an antiquity.  Bottom line here is my children have no idea of the organized ritualized information world I grew up in.

The paradigm has shifted.

Performance Art

In talking about Bowie's passing Larry remembered a couple of things about working on the Boardwalk.  Here is one of them.  This ties to what we did to amuse ourselves.

"Rufus and I did this thing where we'd pretend to have an argument in front of some innocent family who was trying to buy a couple of cones. Our back and forth would go on and on, getting louder and more animated, things would be thrown, then ending up with one of us smashing an ice cream cone in the other's face.  We did one with Rufus as the victim and once with me getting "coned".    The last time we did it, Rufus ran away and left me alone to take care of the customer with an ice cream cone sticking out of my forehead dripping and dripping.

 Ah - good times!"

You Have Got to Ride the Tiger

The Jefferson Airplane had crashed after Woodstock, or at least the band mates had made a rough landing.  Splinter projects shot out from the damaged fuselage.  First came Hot Tuna (because RCA records wouldn’t let you put Hot Shit on a record jacket), then followed the Jefferson Starship. Whereas Hot Tuna was Jorma and Jack’s side blues thing, the Starship was Paul Kantner’s baby start to finish. 

Jefferson Starship the concept released its Blows Against the Empire LP in 1970.  Paul Kantner in this side project was writing anthems, anti-government songs at his full powers.  Blows was a loosely told story about escaping this world. The journey required hijacking a Starship and moving on to what better places might be out there in the universe.  Blows Against the Empire was the ultimate hippie dream, people moving onward and outward carrying with them the highest ideals, love, free sex, community and good drugs. 

As a fifteen year old I loved Blows Against the Empire.  Blows was a battle plan for my life.  Sex, drugs and rock and roll, what could have been better I ask you?  A little good Columbian weed and the album got trippier and trippier.  All over the disc were weird electronic noises.  Laying on your back staring at the phosphorescent stars on the ceiling in you room, if you had smoked enough pot, and you were truly on that stolen starship.

Over the next four years the Jefferson Starship, nominally a side project of the Jefferson Airplane languished.  The Airplane put out a couple of mediocre albums and there was infighting among the band.  But in 1974 out came Dragonfly by the Jefferson Starship.  The music on Dragonfly was pretty amazing stuff.  From all appearances the Airplane had crashed and burned for the last time and Paul Kantner was picking up with his space/futurist fantasies with a couple of new folks on bass and lead guitar.  Dragonfly rocked and rocked hard.

In the summer before I headed off for my freshman year at university Dragonfly was constantly on my turntable.  With the Nixon era winding down during the summer of 1974 I found myself working at an ice cream stand on the boardwalk by the magnificent Atlantic Ocean. Over the course of that summer I would drink a bunch of beer, smoke a bunch of joints and often end up at the end of the island in the sand dunes making out with a fellow Jefferson Starship fan humming the tune from All Fly Away.

Summer ended.  Off to university I went. I think in other tales I have detailed the culture shock of being in Michigan being a native New Jersey-ian.  But I had made it through two terms as they were called, Michigan State Universe was on a quarter not a semester system, and most way through a third when I got a wild hair. 

In the spring term of 1975 the Jefferson Starship appeared and played at Munn Ice Arena on the campus of Michigan State University.  I had bought two tickets to the show in the hope that I might find a date.  No luck.  I was going to have to sell them.  After I called my friend Larry that all changed.  Larry was a Drexel co-op student working in New York.  Larry had worked at the ice cream stand with me in the summer of 74. We talked on the phone from time to time back then. One night I told him about my dilemma with the ticket. Bad Larry told me to hold onto both tickets.  He was going to call me back.

Larry called me back.  He had purchased an airline ticket to East Lansing and was going to come out for the show.  I was stoked.  Fucking A as they would say back in that day.  Larry arrived midday the day of the show.  In a true showing of Michigander hospitality my hall mate Darvon had made up some brownies for the show out of some primo Columbian. A few beers later and Larry and I along with Darvon had each consumed about a quarter of a pan of magic brownies.  Off we went to the show and to universes far beyond our own.

By the time we got to the show Larry and I were as they say nowadays tripping balls.  We were so fucked up we could barely function.  The Starship had an opening act.  There was a bit of punk singer out of Detroit at the time who was a woman.  Her name was Suzi Quatro.  We didn’t get Suzi.  We got her brother Michael.  Michael came out wearing a black Druid like robe with a large metal canister around his next.  As the band played bombastic Styx like riffs Michael took the canister from and began to swing it around and around.  Eventually he aimed it right for the floor and …

FLASH, BANG BLINDING LIGHT, screams and moans from unsuspecting very, very high concert goers.

When that canister hit the stage about 6 flash pots ignited and seemed to explode.  I can’t remember anything else from that performance except that my ears were ringing and my retinas were singed.  Mercifully the set while bombastic was relatively short. 

Minds completely blown away, unhinged even, Larry and I were able to focus on the platform as the Jefferson Starship took the stage.  Paul Kantner led the band in the big hit (well #83 on the Billboard charts) Caroline.  Marty Balin was there and the vocals were perfect.  Marty, Grace Slick and Paul just rocked the joint.  Volunteers, Mexico and Have you Seen the Saucers it was one wonderful song to my youthful ears after another. 

And then the concert was done and Larry and I were still flying. We were in a lower orbit but we were still above the atmosphere.

And I wanted to see my girlfriend of sorts.  Her name was Nan and she lived in Philadelphia600 miles to the east.  With regulated airfares the cost of a single round trip ticket to Philadelphia was about $72 bucks that day.  LP records cost $2.99 each. To make this happen I would have to simply give up on buying about 24 albums over the next six months.  24 albums in 1974 could have been the entire catalog of music that changed rock and roll.  However the balance between the chance of getting laid as the result of a grand gesture versus 24 albums, no brainer.  Still raging high we headed out to the airport and caught the first plane we could ride to Philadelphia. 

Once we got to the airport I think we took a cab to a train.  From there we took the Paoli local up to East Lansdowne.  Luckily although I don’t remember doing it we had called Nan at some point.  Her plans had been to slip away for the weekend. But just about back to normal we found her at home when we knocked.  I believe the greeting was “What the fuck are you two knuckleheads doing here?” We then explained the synchronicity of being blasted away at a Jefferson Starship concert with the wonder of her soul touching us both and how the only result was our cosmic road trip to her door.

I don’t remember much about the time we actually spent there.  We ate we hung out we were the three amigos from the summer before again.  I really couldn’t tell you if I got laid.  Really, I just don’t remember. But it was all good.

And then there was the flight back.  It was a direct from Philly into East Lansing.  I think we might have stopped in Flint.  As we flew there were maybe 10 people on the flight and there was a meal.  The stewardess as we approached came up to me and gave me about 8 fried chicken meals on melmac wrapped in Saran Wrap to go  She told me this was the end of the route for the night and they would be throwing them out.  It might have been because I weighed 135 pounds at the time.

But anyhow I called up the dorm rats and they came out to pick me up.  Five guys showed up in a big old boat of a car, I think it was an old Impala.  When I got in everyone got a chicken dinner and I got handed a beer and a joint for the ride back to the dorm. 

 

I shared this with my friend and he remembered one little nuanced part of it.  According to Bad Larry the plan in the wee hours of the morning had been to go to the Kentucky Derby but morphed into the flight to Philadelphia.  My guess is there was a direct flight east and back in those days it took a bit of planning to get to Louisville.

George Carlin Probably Helped Me Get, uh well, Laid

Roughly What I Looked Like at the Time of This Story

"Yeah, there are 400,000 words in the English language and there are 7 of them that you can't say on television. What a ratio that is! 399,993 to 7. They must really be bad. They'd have to be outrageous to be separated from a group that large.

All of you over here, you 7, baaad words!

That's what they told us they were, remember? "That's a bad word!" No bad words, bad thoughts, bad intentions, and words.

You know the 7, don't you, that you can't say on television?

"Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits."

Those are the heavy seven. Those are the ones that'll infect your soul, curve your spine, and keep the country from winning the war."

In October 1974 George Carlin played Michigan State as one of the homecoming activities.  My memory pegs the date as about October 19 or so.  Mid-October is really the best time to walk the campus at MSU.  

 

October weather is warm enough that a light jacket will do at night and a long sleeve shirt is fine in the day.  October day are sunny days.  The critical thing about the tenth month in East Lansing is that hundreds of tree varieties leaves are turning color.  Those colors include orange and yellow, deep purple and bright red and a whole color wheel of other shades.

 

In mid-October midterms were still a week to a couple of weeks away.  Back then the drinking age was 18 so with no pressure from exams you could hit the bars.  Weed was plentiful so you could smoke bowl after bowl.  Back then it was an age of golden twilights and thoughts shaded in amber.

 

On a whim, or maybe out of my lonely desperation, I asked my coworkers from Kurly Kustard in Ocean City, Nan and Larry and Nan's cousin Barbara to come out for a visit.  To my surprise they said yes. Ah the hubris of youth.  On a whim they drove out across Pennsylvania and Ohio via the turnpikes.

 

My roomie Nate the Great was gone for the weekend.  So were the two guys who lived next to me.  Everybody who was leaving said, "Go ahead use the room," and gave me their kids.  In 1974 we were young, we had a joy of life, but we didn't have a dime. So, the use of the rooms saved a motel bill.

 

Nan and I took my room and Larry and Barbara my neighbor Don Tempe's room.  All I remember are little bits and pieces of what we did that weekend.  There is a clear memory of a walk own by the Red Cedar looking at the ducks.  Nan's just then beginning here career as a birder had her Audubon book fall apart. The book was kind of old and back in those days the glue holding pages in paperbacks didn't last very long, a few years at most. Not bound to the volume pages of the field guide went flying. Rushing with adrenaline we all we ended up chasing wet pages of that birder's field guild down the banks of the river.

 

Back then, all those years ago, Barbara was sharing an apartment with Nan in East Lansdowne, If memory serves me well Larry kind of had a passing interest in Barbara, but I might be wrong about that fact.  If you haven't figured it out from my prior writings, I clearly had a thing for Nan. As for her, well she did not have as enraptured interest in me. I don't think she was sure of what I was or what to do with me. 

 

As a first term freshman I did not realize what a big deal homecoming was.  MSU had 40,300 students at the time and it had been churning a quarter of them out each year for at least 15 years.  Yeah, that is a shit ton of alumni and they all wanted to come back to campus and relive their glory days.  They would wear earlier iterations of the school colors with images of earlier version of the school mascot. Homecoming was huge and things were happening like concerts and marching band parades.

 

In a joint decision we all decided we would spend Saturday evening at a concert.  This required preparation. As I remember it Barbara was strait laced. As a direct result of this Nan and I had to lose her and Larry for a few minutes, we had a need. The short time we were apart let us  blow a joint or three to get ready for George Carlin.  Carlin was performing at the MSU Auditorium.  He was competing with a concert by Dave Loggins somewhere else on campus.  Loggins was a one hit wonder, but "Please Come to Boston" is still something I hum when it comes on the radio.  

 

My thought is Barbara had only seen Carlin doing his hippy dippy weather guy thing on Carson.  When we all agreed, we would go see Carlin I assumed she was going to be ready for his, shall we say more mature schtick. She wasn't.   She really wasn't.

The four of us were sitting in the cheap seats up in the balcony at the MSU Auditorium.  Two of us were stoned and simply saying, "Hello," would send us in to fits of giggles. We would be liquid with laughter one Carlin got going.

 

Carlin almost at once started riffing on what would happen if couches gave up every silent fart that had passed into them.  Nan and I laughed just riotously.  Barbara offered a few polite guffaws and Larry squirmed.  My assumption is that eh squirm came because Larry:

• a. Knew Nan and I were stoned and he wished he was because this would be so much better, and

• b. Wanted to laugh but he didn't want to offend Barbara and his chances for the evening.   

Things just spiraled from there.  By the time Carlin got to the part about how fucking was so nice that fuck you should be our greeting in lieu of hello I was about to pee myself.  Barbara at that point had her jaw clenched closed and Larry was in total squirm.  On the other hand, Nan and I were laughing riotously at both Carlin and at the Barbara/Larry situation. 

 

When it was over, we headed back to the dorm.  If my memory serves me well, and it may not because I was indeed quite high, Barbara was on a tirade about blue comics, Larry had his head hung down and Nan and I couldn't look at each other without giggling.  

 

Sensing she didn't want to argue the merits of blue comics I grabbed Nan and we ducked into my room.  Me, I think that it was because of the whole fuck you riff that Nan engaged me in forenesia (mercy fucking) that night.  Forever the Grateful Dead's "Wake of the Flood," will bring a sly smile to my face. Thanks to George Carlin I lost my virginity.  George where ever you are, whatever space your molecules now occupy, I think you for that.

 

There is a bit of a coda to this story.  I will always remember the call from a hysterical Nan telling me that Larry was being taken to jail in Ohio for speeding. Yeah, that was a thing in Ohio back in those days. The Ohio State Troopers would pull you over and shake you down for whatever cash they could wring out of you. Apparently the smokies got enough dinero that the trip home for the trio was only slightly delayed.

 

  

Second Cold Night January 2016

Fire is roaring bright on this cold winter night. The woodstove takes in what we give it as fuel and returns heat. A pot on top bubbles away filled with cloves and orange peels and cinnamon sticks. The scent moves palpably through the whole house. Smells like hipsters in the 1970s smoking clove cigarettes and drinking tea.

Outside these walls the frigid season is now really here. With little warning, but it is January so there should not be any need for warning, winter in all its artic force pounds against the wood frame of the house. Cold air wiggles and jimmies any window pane not caulked up tight. Frigid fingers of icy air tear at anything not locked down tight. The draft doggies are out along the doors.

Walking into the wind is brutal. A scarf wrapped around your face isn’t a fashion faux pas. Wool on those cheeks could be the difference between damn cold and frostbite. Not many people are out at the noontime for a walk right now. I have seen them walk to the windows in the office and watch others coming into the building’s lobby. The layers and bundles of clothes one upon the other on these visitors say quietly, “Can’t we do this whole exercise thing some other way?” It hasn’t gone below zero yet but that distance is not far off.

Faith in Trees

What is very, very important? What concerns are so important that we must go out and address them? What of faith and what of belief.

Wearing his fedora a man stands in a small stand of thin trees. Winter, the sky is a dark white, maybe light grey, but it is snow laden and threatening to let loose soon. The ground in the woods is also white. Dingy clumps of paths cleared are now covered up by new clean sparkling snow. The earth’s warmth has kept the sidewalk clear so far. This moment in the trees exists between two “snow events”

Clad in his long leather coat the man stops. Dark eyes survey the small empty wood he has been journeying through. Forty years he thinks to himself forty years and this wood is not really much different that when I first came by this way. No tree had seemed to be more than a few feet taller. No tree seemed more than a maybe an inch thicker. He was 90 pounds heavier, six inches wider and everything about him had changed since that first trek through this trees.

Standing in the thin woods snowflakes would occasionally fall and find their way to ground, a warning not to delay perhaps. This space, this place was very much the same when he first passed this way. How much longer until these trees mature he thought silently. How much longer until I mature he then mused. His slight smile hid a good natured inner guffaw at that question.

Light was fleeing this end of day. With the hints of snow threatening the air was cold enough that he could not linger long here. Were these clouds not so dense, the sun would have been fading and falling away behind his back. One foot moved forward, for he knew he would have to push on to his appointment.

100 years ago had he been standing here without a tent pitched already or a cabin in his sightline he would have been in trouble. Precious life might well had been in jeopardy if he lacked flint and a knife. Tonight he was simply going to listen to a talk about epistemology. In simple terms someone would be talking about how we know what we know and what are we justified in believing. Standing on that path amongst those trees now forty years his acquaintance he knew and he believed.

And yes those are really the trees in which he stands.