33 - Roads Crossed and Uncrossed

Deep in the rain-green foothills, near where Red Hills Road meets Highway 49, old buildings slumber, and settle into the rich soil, and wait.

Waiting too are the spirits that on cold wet nights animate them, spirits of men doomed by a lurking horror and thus imprisoned in dark and mouldering rooms.

They look down from their shadowed windows. I sense them, almost hear them, as I learned to do so long ago.

It was a close and dicey business back then and I could see that tales of a similar nature could be told of this place. For here a house was eradicated, and, most importantly, also the chambers formerly enclosed beneath its foundations. We can be thankful for the unknown men who took care of business here, and opened it to the air, and let the trees grow.

Yet now, some years later, the streets remain silent when strangers walk them. If you look quickly, a lone individual might be seen some distance away, clad in camouflage bow-hunting gear or oil-stained dungarees. He will watch under lowered brows and a ragged mop of hair, and then be gone.

A strangely misshapen face might peer dully from one of the few occupied houses, and then disappear.

Clearly the work is not done. A shadow lingers; and I would venture to say it has taken root in the hearts of the remaining residents. I say this because we can read the clues, however few.

A house pulsates slowly with life, emanating strange lights and sounds just beyond the senses, as of a house quietly occupied; yet the gates are all overgrown, the long grass undisturbed, the windows shuttered ...

Yet paths are trod ...

... and objects not there, then are, and then are not again.

It was time to leave, and swiftly, when I felt the web drawing about us. Near a house where a dog had been barking at us, but now was silent, watching, the bait lay on a street that had been clear but minutes before.

Without thought I took up the silver circle that is used to ensnare men. Only by reading the crude lettering did I awaken, as if from a daydream, and recognize the danger. Swiftly I let it fall, thanking the gods that I knew something of these things. I bade us get in the car and leave without delay.

Someday I might return, properly prepared and with trained company. But only if a townsman asks of us the service. That is an inviolate rule and until such a request is made, the town, what’s left of it, must be left to the demons that remain in its rotten basements, infecting the souls of the men living on the floors above them, and scrabbling against wood, dirt and brick when it is their time to feed.

32 - So, What's The Story Here?

31 - Prolifery

There's this professional complex. There's a family counselor type guy in there. There's other stuff too and since early every Monday morning these people set up on the sidewalk, I'm guessing there's some sort of planned parenthood office.

Dunno why this pic doesn't show unless you click on it but I've spent more than enough time trying to fix it already

They’re not obnoxious. No bullhorns. They just stand there and mutter over their printouts. Maybe they’re singing.

I feel I’m in a very minority position as a sort of libertarian pro-lifer. What the hell does that mean? Well, I believe in individual freedom. All those pro-choicers who take “pro-life” as some sort of anti-woman position can kiss my ass and take their bigotry elsewhere. (Sorry, pisses me off. There’s this internet dude who takes extreme leftie positions and his purblind certainty has radicalized me a little.) I strongly support any adult’s choice to have sex with whomever they choose so long as whoever they choose is willing. That’s a no-brainer.

The question is, who has rights and who doesn’t? It’s easy to say a fetus doesn’t have any rights just to make it easy. But it was also easy to say an African-American was worth only two-thirds a person just to make certain legislative procedures easy. That was arbitrary, and so is saying a fetus has no rights. I need to be shown, logically, that the fetus is not deserving of protection.

And that’s an uphill battle. Even California considers the murder of a pregnant woman to be a double murder.

So what about choice, and the first amendment, and privacy? Got a couple things to say about that.

Privacy. When Roe v Wade was passed (’71? ’73?) there was more family privacy than there is today. The liberals all say the Constitution is a living and evolving document, unlike us constructionists, so fine: The right to privacy has changed since Roe v Wade. Back then it was not yet law that a teacher or other professional who works with children must report any signs of child abuse. That was a private family matter and though some people did report it, they were not yet required to. It was also a private family matter if a man rapes his wife. I remember when a man went to court for raping his wife in the late 70s. It was big news because it was a big deal. A man can be accused of raping his own wife? Wait. That didn’t compute with a lot of people. No one’s business. Of course today a husband (or wife) can be dragged in for all sorts of things that happened behind closed doors. And this is a good thing. I’m fully on board with that. But we were not on board with that in 1973, and that is the environment in which an abortion was considered a private matter, between a woman and her doctor, with the child or whatever it is not being of concern.

My opinion, things have changed. What makes the intentional killing of a viable human being so much less of a problem than poking a lit cigarette into your kid’s arm?

Choice. Here’s the thing: The pro-life position does not take away one iota of a woman’s choice. Oh, sure, it takes away the choice to have an abortion. But what kind of choice is that? The law takes away my choice to spare my wife any more of the insult that is the continued existence of her mother by having her killed, and you don’t see me complaining about that (much). You all need to look at what the real choices are. Have sex? Great! Do it all day and all night! That is your choice and if you also choose to have sex with a fertile male, go right on ahead, ain’t no one’s business if you do. Get preggers? Well, now. Seems there’s an interested third party.

Pregnancy seems to me to be a sort of a predictable consequence of a woman having sex with a fertile male. Whether or not you use birth control, it could happen. Once it does, you’ve got a moral issue if you don’t want to be inconvenienced. It is horrible beyond words when people sweep that moral issue and that life under the rug just because they can. Is that a choice worth protecting? The choice of choosing partners is, and what to do with them. But to kill the predictable result?

See, you have the right to sit in your home and drink as much you want. Drink all day and all night. That’s your choice. But we all agree that once the predictable result of drunkenness kicks in, you do not then have the choice to get in your car and drive somewhere. No one cares how inconvenient that is for you. Got called in to work a shift? Have to get your daughter from daycare? Mom is dying in the hospital? Tough. You’re drunk, and you don’t have the choice to drive. Think of something else.

Consequences are simple enough to understand. I don’t see the so-called “right” to abort a pregnancy as a matter of choice. I see sexual freedom as choice, anything you want to do with your body; but once you’re preggers your body isn’t just yours anymore, and like it or not every civilized society known to Womankind has chosen to protect the weak against a deadly response to inconvenience.

So, yeah. I’m totally Pro-Choice. There is no contradiction to being Pro-Choice and being Pro-Life. You just have to frame it correctly. It’s not a simple matter of privacy. It’s a matter of life and of death, and of rights, and of properly balancing them.

All THAT said, I would not shut down the clinics. I’m not a total idealist. Got my practical side. Abortion may be immoral and wrong but it is also the best of some really bad options for some people, and to get all draconian about that would not be an improvement. And let me fully disclose here: If either of my boys knocked up their girlfriends (sometimes there are six people sleeping in this house), I’d prefer their girls "take care of it" than that they put their lives on hold to produce me a grandchild that then gets adopted away. No one that young should be saddled with that. Let her go do it if she chooses and don’t lay any guilt on her for it.

Selah.

30 - Halfway

Sometimes I sit here and click around looking again and again in the same places but I'm not sure what I'm looking for. A person. A touch. Something to react to, an excuse to reach out.

So easily I let my world shrink to include just the reach of my arms, and so easily I push the one person away from me who really loves me, and then I try to fill that empty space with ... what? I'm not a controlling person, yet I act like one, trying in vain to construct a world I want out of the few pieces I allow myself to have. Sometimes those pieces are just the pieces I can reach right here: conjured up through my keyboard.

Yesterday was the halfway point for my sabbatical. It's been four weeks since I was at the office and it will be four weeks before I go back. It has been an interesting time but I would not say as effectively spent as it is meant to be. Everyone must decompress but some small amount of self-reinvention requires a more focused effort. There are many things to work on -- weekend projects for which normal weekends were never time enough, habits of productive writing, little always-wanted trips, etc. -- and some of them have been worked on. But.

It’s no secret that there is a blocking issue and before it is resolved none of this other stuff will much fall into place. And though I sound like a broken record every time I try to write it out to some kind listener, there is real progress. The circles I am going around in are wider now, and faster, and stirring up more dust. I’m not going to go into details here. But in the next few weeks I really need to force the process of discovering just what the real problem is, and be willing to lose everything that I will lose once I take a stand that is truly mine to take. Do not underestimate the power and fear of this loss. It might not be her. It might instead be you, and that makes me crazy with sorrow.

29 - Vintage Woodworking Power Tools

“Dave” was the one who responded to my Craigslist ad and then followed up with emails when I ignored him, then when I said sorry I’ll be out of town, gave me his number and said call when I am free. I liked his persistence so a few days after my last trip I called and he said cool, see you Friday.

Watch your fingers, those belts will whip em off like pulling a cigarette out of a box

A Chevy pickup pulled into the drive and a burly Latino about forty stepped out with a shaven head and tattoos down his arms. His granddaughter dozed in the passenger seat as we looked the tools over, plugged them in, verified they worked. Sort of worked. Worked good enough. We took the big motor off so we could lift the table, put them in, he handed me cash, drove away. I gave the money to my wife. She made a sad face, and thanked me for following through.

They were old. I advertised them as “Vintage woodworking power tools” and I wasn’t kidding. The table saw and jointer dated from 1950, the sander and scroll saw not a lot newer. My father-in-law’s father was a woodworker, a carpenter, worked at Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard back when "Hunter's Point" didn't mean blighted projects and random killings. Did his own work too and kept power tools in the basement of his house in South San Francisco. He died in the early 1960s and the tools followed my father-in-law around from place to place. He died in the early 2000s and the tools wound up in my garage. They took up a lot of space. Now they don’t.

But they were family, and now they are somewhere else, and the handmade tables are probably in splinters by now. Hey, can’t hold on to everything forever. Yeah, I know.

28 - Sights Along the Way

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes, they forgive them -- Oscar Wilde

The hills are only green for a month or so

Mom wanted to see me yesterday so I drove down. She lives with a view of Suisun Bay and its bridges and refineries, just up from a long disused ferry slip. It is entirely appropriate that she would spend these waning years in sight and smell of the "old" Bay Area, where cars used to line up before they built the Benicia Bridge, where there was a thriving shipbuilding industry a century ago, where William Leidesdorff's little steamboat Sitka huffed slowly past on its way to New Helvetia on the Sacramento in 1847. Her condo is full of light and books and the best of her old furniture. We had soup and salad. She wanted to talk about Jimmy.

Jimmy was such a rambunctious and unmindful child she kept him on a harness when she would take him to the park while pregnant with Steve. She remembers a woman saying that with a child like that, she was brave to have another. He was calmer by the time he was four and in January of that year they learned he had leukemia. In and out of the hospital, prayer, counseling. A parish priest with a young family of his own spent a lot of time with both my parents, and some with us little kids. My parents did not communicate much. They dealt with the pain in their own ways. Dad was not religious by any means.

Mom remembers very clearly visiting Jimmy at Children's Hospital in Oakland and hearing him say something about if he goes home again. Not when. If. He never did. He died two months after his fifth birthday, in November of 1959. Steve was three. I was one. Not long after, she held my younger cousin for the first time, who was just a few weeks old.

Then they split, went their separate ways, distracted by the Sixties, ignored Steve and I to a large degree, ya da ya. I've covered that enough in other places, I'm really thinking I should read one of those books about forgiving your parents. I pretty much have done so by now. You have to at some point and their becoming increasingly dependent on you is a pretty good sign that it's time. We talked about that too, and she got a sense that it really wasn't an issue for me. Not anymore. Yes, when I was raising my own kids and felt so helpless so many times, flailing about in a darkness not illuminated by role models and experience. But that time is past.

Mount Diablo from near Mom's house

I drove on to my father’s house to meet a realtor. Dad moved out last year and I’ve been going through it, bringing the crap he doesn’t want up to my house, throwing crap away, generally emptying the place out. Now it’s time to plan cleanup and sale. Fortunately, no major repairs needed. The agent saw that it just needed paint and flooring, a few minor fixes, nothing big. Pretty good considering my grandparents bought it in 1974. But next week I will pursue a second opinion. I think this guy spent thirty years in banking and only does low-end real estate now because he needs a job. In other words, I’m not sure I can bank on his experience.

Wildflowers 'n stuff

I called my dad later to ask about ownership and inheritance. The house was never really his. When his mother died it went into a trust, for which he is trustee, and when all is sold and done he will split the money in the trust between my brother and I. The idea was to avoid ballooning his net worth into the realm of death-taxable. Besides, he doesn’t need the money. Us young’uns arguably do.

He was about to suggest it was time to call a realtor when I told him I had just met a realtor. Evidently we’re all on the same page. He’s glad I’m doing it all and he doesn’t have to bother. Never mind that he’s no longer capable physically. He also says he’s tending more and more to hibernate. He’s all there, but he’s not there all the time, and his world is shrinking. I think his world now pretty much consists of his rooms, and the people he shares a dinner table with, and a short list of doctors and specialists. It must be a melancholy experience; but then, when your horizons shrink, your apparent universe remains the same size, doesn’t it.

Diablo after taking off her cloak of clouds

Mom’s world isn’t shrinking. She’s still a docent at the Asian Art Museum, and is going to take a tour of New York City in a couple months. She’s never been there outside a one-day Gray Line tour she took with her two teenage boys in the early Seventies. After getting rooms for under thirty dollars in Nevada, I was shocked that her hotel bill was going to be two eighty five per night. She can’t afford that (my opinion). But she asked about senior discounts. Oh, they said, if you’re over eighty it’s just eighty dollars. Ha, she said, me and my friend are both over eighty and we can prove it. I wonder if the hotelier said, damn, should have said ninety.

Sometimes old stuff floats around forever

I know my boys will have to forgive me some day. I hope it’s no big deal and the need doesn’t hamper them in any way. But I have a few memories of parenting failure on my part that just break my heart. But I was here for them, by and large, and that might be the important thing. I can only hope those moments of daddy fail don’t take up much space.

See, lately I’ve been letting incidents out from my childhood that had been buried for decades, stories my wife never heard and that just make her shake her head. Incidents of parent fail that somehow buried themselves like wasp larvae to quietly release poison into my system over the years. Now they’re coming out, and so I naturally wonder what wasp larvae my kids are bearing that will come out when they’re fifty. Or thirty, or twenty one with any luck. Moments when I just wasn’t there and said something cruelly stupid, or didn’t do something that needed to be done, or what have you.

There’s no taking any of it back. These experiences are part of what make us. Just sayin’, you know.

I dove home, thinkin’ all the way. Driving’s good for that.

27

26 - Flashy

Took a blade to the whiskers and went for the look of a Nineteenth Century bounder, cad, and Knight of the British Empire.  But they were a bit thin: I need another half inch anyway. My kid looked at me and said I looked redneck. Where I live, that wouldn't be unusual. Might even help. Maybe I should go down and get the roto-tiller back from Gary before I shave clean, case he's in the mood to serve some small-engine-repair scammery on a yuppy today. After that, who knows. Go down to the porno store and see if they got any Jack Wrangler videos for Betamax.

25 - Big Hairy Chin

Time to shave the road trip whiskers. Two weeks' growth starting to look like an actual old-man beard rather than that attractive vacation scrubble so OFF IT GOES.

Tomorrow.

Today I've forms to build and concrete to pour.  I'm learning something on this here time off:  Life is so much better if I don't waste it writing shit.  Man.  When I am in an office I make time to write shit, because I let myself get bored with the work.  That's not real smart because instead of succeeding at something, I fail at two somethings.  Failure isn't as much fun as succeeding.  Hopefully the slab will go all right.  I'm not exactly a concrete expert but I'm good enough for what needs doin' today.  It will go better than any writing would, anyway.

24 - A Race of Wheelbarrows

The bitch of it was, the new wheel didn't fit the old axle.  A few years ago I tried grinding the old axle down, but then realized it wouldn't fit the brackets any more.  So I let it go, and got by with one old wheelbarrow that needed its tire pumped up all the time.  Tried repairing that, but that didn't work either.

The New Brace

No, I don't know why, cause now that's fixed.  One good old wheelbarrow.  Plus I went around and found a piece of threaded 5/8 tube stock that worked fine as a new axle.  Two good old wheelbarrows.  Just before all that, to keep the ol' lady happy, I finally relented and bought a new wheelbarrow.  So now, instead of one that's flat all the time, I've got three.  I feel like Kim Jong Il after getting some new rocket launcher trucks.  And what do you call a bunch of wheelbarrows?  A bunch?  A phalanx?  A regiment?  No, I came up with a better term.

The New Race

23 - Big Hairy Nuts

Poor babies not getting enough love these days.

So Wednesday I checked into a motel in South Lake Tahoe. While I was in the office, a girl came in. Very pretty, blonde, maybe twenty-ish. She looked oddly familiar, which struck me in this completely random place, so I spoke to her boyfriend.

“She looks familiar. Where you guys from?”

“Rocklin.” He looked at me suspiciously. Who wouldn’t. “Where you from?”

“Orangevale.”

He took his beefy tight-t-shirted self off to unload the car. Didn’t look real happy. Rocklin and Orangevale are near each other. My son goes to school up in Rocklin, and that’s where one of his old girlfriends lived. The one whom I now realized this girl reminded me of.

I hoped they had an argument. “Who’s this old dude in a random motel knows who you are?” Maybe she thought about Orangevale, and my son, and something weird crossed her face, and no one got laid that night. One can hope.

22 - Octahut

Burning Man has been described as (among many other things) a place where the primal gods of fire and love re-emerge in us. Vulcan and Venus come alive there every year, as flames jet from fantastic home-built machines, and in the firelight goddesses dance their flower-painted bliss. The image is simple, because it’s fundamental, and in surprising moments completely true.

Other times, not, but whatever. Us little vulcanites do what we can. At present were building octahuts. The Cap’n designed this wind-strong domicile to be made out of nine sheets of OSB plywood, easily transported, easily assembled. We’ll make a whole city, eventually, but damn if it didn’t take all afternoon just to cut the sheets for one. The variations are endless, though: Cut a door, cut windows, hang sconces, insert an A/C unit, whatever, and paint to suit. I’m thinking to make one out of radiant barrier sheathing such as we put in the roof of our house: Has a heat-reflective surface that will also give the effect of low-quality mirrors all around inside. Should make for interesting nights when the wind howls and the candles are lit.

21 - A Mind is a Terrible Thing

Other than a slight sore throat I was in normal health, winding over Kit Carson Pass and down through the forest, impatient with the way tourists drive Highway 50 (too fast in the straights, too slow in the corners), ready to get on home. As I drew closer I got sicker. By the time my son was helping me return the rental car I could barely sit up straight, I was so nauseous.  Today, a day later, I'm just getting over it.  Like a 24-hour flu except that it was entirely psychosomatic.  In other words:

A) Nine days of processed food, bad sleep if any, and chronic dehydration had done their work and by the time I was nearly home my subconscious was finally giving its body permission to suffer for it; or

B) Anticipation of changes and difficult conversations created stresses which my body reacted to in the usual way. Take your pick.

Of course, as I expected, some of the solitude-induced so-called clarity came immediately into question once I re-entered the environment. Some people are just too smart for me.  Or maybe I am.  Either way.  There's a road, and there's a cliff.

20 - Home, Sick

A truck in Tonopah feels about like I do

19 - Weary Wednesday

Caught a cold, drove 234 miles, took 249 pictures, and wound up drinking alone in a bar at Harrah's Stateline. Happy St. Pat's.

18 - Tourist Tuesday

The Road goes ever on and on ...

And on.

And on.

And on.

And is longer for some than for others.

And longer still for others.

There were mountains.

And the bones of broken dreams.

And an MQ-1 Predator doing touch-and-go's at Creech AFB.

And then as dusk lengthened under thin high clouds, I wandered into Goldfield, one of the West's best ghost towns. It is neither touristy, nor a preserved relic, but a town that simply refuses to die, a corpse with a beating heart, an ancient bristlecone pine dead of wood most parts, but the sap still slowly flowing.

I wandered the dirt streets. Black broken windows watched me snoop my camera lens around. Patches of dirty snow lay in shaded corners. Now and then a resident crossed a street three blocks down, or an old truck sat at a corner awhile and slowly turned away. Soon the shadows under Goldfield whispered into the silence drifting down from the mountains. They said it was time for me to go.

I drove up to Tonopah and took refuge at the Tonopah Motel, stale cigarette smoke, internet, laundry, $29.99. I asked if she had a Triple A rate. Not at twenty nine ninety nine, she said. I said I was kidding and walked across the highway to the Mexican restaurant for my third meal in two days.

17 - Missing Monday

... fahren fahren fahren auf der Autobahn ...

What's missing from this picture?

Helmets!  Gawd I love Arizona. There's amazing unexpected stuff.

There's neat-o crazy unexpected stuff.

There's so much something, they even have extra nothing.

And just when-- OH SHIT!

No worries, I hid the bottle.  Later I needed another.

And another.

Good thing I wasn't in a hurry.