Guess Rove isn’t going to be indicted after all. Ah Fitzgerald, we thought we knew thee.
Category Archives: stories
trip photos
I’ve started uploading a few photos of my trip on Flickr. Click the link on the right.
Bayley House
Today I stopped to visit the Bayley House in Pilot Hill, a few miles south of Cool. Hard to believe it was once a fine mansion.
You can see it as it once was, and learn about its history and restoration efforts on this web site.
redrum
Hey, I forgot to tell you guys what was on the TV Friday night, the night before I left to begin my week of seclusion in the deep woods. The Shining. No joke. For a week or two, my buddy Erik and I have been joking about how I’m going to wander off into insanity and start typing All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, over and over and over. And I still might. But to find that movie on, while I was packing, was just too weird. I wasn’t really sitting and watching, but I got to catch the scene where Shelley Duval finds the manuscript, the scene where the kid is riding the big wheel through the halls (damn that’s scary!) and the end … them driving off in the snowcat, and Jack with his frozen grin.
So far, just one paranormal experience. Last night, I was heading downstairs here to the bottom level of the house, which is the playroom, office and laundry, off the garage. Romie, the little gray cat was ahead of me on the stairs, but when I got to the bottom I couldn’t find him. Vanished. I looked everywhere. On the furniture, under the desk, behind the TV … searched the room. No cat. The laundry machines are in a nook under the stairs. I looked on both sides of them, and even — feeling crazy — in the drier, which had been closed. I thought he must have dodged me and run back up the stairs when I entered, and I sat at the desk.
Strange noises from the laundry. I looked again. No cat. I’m starting to get a little freaked. Finally, he came walking out. He’d been behind the washer and drier. WTF?
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I just adore a cathouse view
It was a long drive up here yesterday. Eight hours and a little more. I saw a lot of agriculture, a good deal of insanity behind the wheel, and a little irony. The best example was a billboard for a business in Delano, north of Bakersfield. It said, “Se Habla Espanol.” Spanish spoken. I had to laugh. That sign in Delano is like one in Paris, saying “French Spoken.”
Anyway, it’s a beautiful warm late Spring day in the foothills of the Sierras, and here I am, hanging with the kitties. I’ve set up a writing space in the dining room, from which I have this view to the northeast for about 15 miles. The radio station, out of Nevada City, is playing reggae.
I like reggae well enough. Brother Joe and I saw Jimmy Cliff open for Jerry Garcia at the amphitheatre in Berkeley once.
Helluva show, and a very happy crowd.
Speaking of Happy, it seems she accidentally got let out yesterday, and ran like the wind. It took a small task force of Mom, Dad, neighbors and kids to catch her, and my Dad to carry her home. She’s OK. For those who haven’t been following the thread, Happy is our Pomeranian, who has a serious heart condition and a lifelong history of making a run for it. Not to run away, she just loves to run. In my mind, it was a tragedy narrowly averted. But my Mom said the little dog looked Happy, like she was young and free again, like old times. Something to be said for that, no doubt.
I was listening to Me & Bobby McGee, Grateful Dead version, on the way up yesterday.
Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose …
Nothin’ left to lose? Well that’s pretty ironic, isn’t it? … Be at peace in your heart, little friend. We all get a big race to run at the end, and ‘til that day comes, no shame in settling for a good tummy rub.
coming attractions
I’m hanging out in the coffeehouse, listening to a French singer, with bongos and a trombone. I don’t speak French, but I think this means you need to know what’s coming up for me.
I don’t know if it can get a lot stranger than this music, but it’s going to get pretty weird. My brother and sis-in-law are getting ready to take off for a 10 day trip. They have two cats, one of whom has a heart problem and has to stay home. He can’t travel to my house to be cared for, and he can’t go to the vets’ for boarding. They need a petsitter. I won’t bore you with the process of selection and elimination by which the task falls to be alone. Me, alone. Alone.
Now I’m not a solitary person. Writers spend a lot of time alone – hours alone. In fact, I’m alone write now. (Write now – get it?) But not all day. Never all day and all night. I’m social. Solitude is part of the process, sometimes part of life, especially if you live alone like me. But it needs to be taken in manageable doses. I spend time with other people every day. And I live in a condo. There are people around. I can look out and see people – children playing – right outside. I can hear them talking below my windows. That’s what I’m used to.
My bro and his wife and child live in the foothills northeast of Sacramento, in a remote home, in a quiet, secluded and woody neighborhood. It’s not exactly in the middle of nowhere, but you can see the middle of nowhere from their porch. On a clear day, you can see sometimes the end of the line from the deck. And did I mention it’s quiet? It’s on a forested cul-de-sac, with just a few neighbors off through the trees. It’s rare to see them drive by. You never hear them, unless someone fires up a chainsaw.
But I agreed to go up and look after the kitties and and keep them company, for a little less than a week, while my nephew stays here in SB with my folks. We hope that a familiar person will be good for the cats, keep the separation anxiety in check. A paid petsitter will come daily for the rest of the time. Speaking of time, I have a few ideas for avoiding going completely Here’s Johnny, but there’s nothing in my experience to compare with this. So I can’t guarantee I’m coming back with my elevator still going all the way up.
I’ll be blogging it, of course.
nothing there
Well I guess I’ve still got this blog thing going, though I’ve been neglecting it a little lately. I’ve been preoccupied, and doing more worrying and fussing than thinking. When I try to put my finger on something I’ve been thinking about lately — beyond the heart’s poor, sore tremblings in the face of the monolithic Moment — there’s nothing there. So it goes. Here’s a new poem.
Life Comes
Imagine a bowling ball was left
in the center of a large parking lot
in the darkness of early morning.
Maybe the parking lot of a Wal-mart
store, with no cars. So picture
the fade-in: the camera slowly
pulls back from the surface
of this black bowling ball
on the pitch black tarmac.
Black on black, deep blue,
a line of gray as something
more than nothing finally
comes with the sun still
cold beyond the blunted hills.
No one can be blamed
for all of this, least of all
the sleeping animals, dead
to the world which is dead
to them, but a soft
and indefensible hope for the day.
So I rise passively, already surrendered,
knowing life has come for me again,
that whatever comes for me between
this hot shower and the hour when
I pull the sheet over my head
and pretend to be hidden again tonight,
none of it is personal. It’s just
another day on its own terms.
J. Kyle Kimberlin
Draft, June 2, 2006
Draft, June 2, 2006
Peace Activists Punished with Pepper Spray
Police and sheriff’s deputies clad in riot gear fired at least four rounds of pepper spray in an hour after asking the demonstrators several times to stop, authorities said. No one was arrested, but paramedics were dispatched to treat some activists.
Dozens of demonstrators crouched in the port plaza, dousing each other’s eyes with water and offering slices of onion to soothe their throats.
“It burned. I couldn’t open my eyes for 20 minutes,” said Rachel Graham, among those hit. “My face is burning. I dunked my face in water and in Puget Sound.”
…
“The majority were very peaceful, nonviolent, just exercising their constitutional rights,” sheriff’s Capt. Bradley Watkins said.
Same as it ever was. We have a government that divides the nation and separates us from the rest of the world. Demonstrators can be pretty stupid when mob rule kicks in. I mean, what good is busting through a fortified gate into the port? You can’t do anything inside that you can’t do outside. And the cops … well, they are cops because they get a certain satisfaction from inflicting punishment.
big grey shark jumping thing
Lee Goldberg – A Writer’s Life — points out that verisimilitude was pronounced dead in the season finale of Grey’s Anatomy. I couldn’t agree more.
brave
I made this image in photoshop, from two photos I took. I made it for wallpaper, but also posted it to Flickr. I know that many, if not most, of the people who use Flickr are more purists than I am, and frown a bit at heavy digital manipulation of images. I have a different opinion. I consider “post-production” to be an extension of the creative process. But that’s me.
Dear lord above, can’t you know I’m pining,
tears all in my eyes
Send down that cloud with a silver lining,
lift me to paradise
ghost story
The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted — to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned along ago. As if I was a ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.
— Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Metaphor 