Halloween

Karla dressed up as ‘Tigger’ from Winnie the Pooh and went door to door trick or treating with friends from school. I had on an Arabic headdress and trench coat ..so, I guess that made me a Sheik. Afterwards, Laura, Karla and I sat on a sidewalk cafe, off State Street, and tossed candy to all the people walking by dressed in funny-looking costumes. We saw lots of people dressed like Jack Sparrow or Captain Morgan ..and heard the sound of many people going 'ahrrrrrrrrgh'. We also saw gypsies ..belly dancers ..witches ..monsters ..aliens ..zombies ..angels ..messengers of death ..skeletons ..household appliances ..marijuana farmers ..transvestites ..some boys ..some girls ..some I don’t know ..I did recognize Hunter S Thompson though ..his buddy said I was the only one who did ..but now I’m not sure that those farmers were wearing costumes.

Flashback

A spider web is finer than silk ..and a hundred times more elastic than a bungee cord. That’s because it's made up of all these interconnections ..so that activity in one part gets transmitted immediately to all the other parts ..like the fleeting connections that exist between thoughts and images ..where one memory activates another ..then another ..then another ..until I’m standing in a parking lot ..that used to be a field ..before the sonic and the walgrens ..and I hear my mother’s voice calling me for dinner ..while I feel the anticipation of swinging at another pitch ..and waiting until I hear the next call ..the one that comes before the angry call ..on another warm summer night down a suburban avenue ..without a care in the world ..when my dad paid all the bills.

Land of the living

My first mistake was preparing for a trip to Big Sur instead of staying in bed. Tuesday felt like hell ..but I took my car in for repairs anyway ..and had breakfast downtown with the idea of doing some last minute shopping. Didn’t take long for me to realize that my plan didn’t stand a chance. I made it as far as the library where I knew there was comfortable furniture to lay down on. After that, I figured walking was out of the question ..so I went by Laura’s work and borrowed her truck ..drove myself home and laid down some more. Later I picked her up and we went to get my car out of the shop. New breaks and a minor tune. Great, now my car is ready for a trip that I’m not going to make. Thursday I cancelled two weeks lodging and workshops at Esalen in a voice that was barely audible. I think they took pity on me because, one ..I sounded so bad, and two ..I was missing a Big Sur retreat. They refunded everything including a deposit which was rightfully theirs to keep. That was sure sweet of someone up there. Today I feel like I’m one step closer to the land of the living.

Fire

orange sky at noon
fire breathing dragon of doom
solar nostrils flare
balls of fire soar
igniting the chaparral below
smoke rises
blocking the sun and moon
life on the line
can turn on a dime
but to make it stop
starve the beast
that’s the ticket
not much to eat
on a blackened mountaintop

Nano size

Nano tech bio-injector systems
can deliver pain blockers
directly at the receptor site.
Nano tech bio-switches
can turn on and off genes
that regulate immune response
which is good for things like lupus,
lymphoma and arthritis.

Mi Ahijada

Mi Ahijada

Last night we put Tia Laurita on a bus to ‘Tia Juana’ (Tijuana, Mexico) for an appointment with the adoption agency. Afterwards, mi Ahijada (my Goddaughter) Karla and I went back to the house and I helped her with her algebra homework. They begin in the seventh grade here, however, she tells me that in Mexico they actually start in the sixth grade .. but what’s really amazing is that I can still do any algebra at all ..! I tried to make it a game of ‘grouping like variables’ before ‘simplifying an expression’ ..I told her there’s less likely to be any ‘stragglers’ that way. For breakfast this morning, I served my usual english muffins with peanut butter and banana. Karla rolled hers and ate it like a tortilla. Next she went into the bathroom and pulled her long hair back into pigtails ..using fresh lemon instead of gel in the front to straighten and hold it in place. Really shows her pretty face. She tells me that she does this every morning before school. That’s why they call her ‘BIG tails’.

Sunday with Laura and Karla

Laura and I have brunch at IHOP where she tells me about her adventure bringing Karla into the United States from Mexico. The other diners probably think we’re trafficking in narcotics ..or people. Later on, we pick up Karla at her friend’s house ..put Andy in the back of the truck and go watch the sunset on the beach. Andy buries his squeaky toy in the sand but Karla finds it. In the evening, we fill up on pho at the local Vietnamese restaurant and I think to myself that Karla was born in another country, eighteen years after the war ..so Vietnam cannot possibly have the same meaning for her as it does for me ..and I tell myself that there is probably no reason it should ..other than as a passage in a history book.

Friday with Karla and Laura

I sit on the deck reading the LA Times ..and wait until the last possible moment to go to the post office and mail my mortgage payment before they make a street person out of me. On the way back, I go by Alisos where I see mi Ahijada (my Goddaughter). We go pick up Tia Laurita from work ..grab our jackets ..put Andy in the back of the truck ..and drive to the beach where Karla does cartwheels in the sand ..Andy chases birds out to sea ..and the sun goes down over the mesa. Afterwards, we go to Piattes for fish and pasta. Laura tells me that they moved Karla to a more advanced level in junior high ..which doesn’t surprise me. She also tells me that she is thinking about putting modular homes (not mobile homes) on the back lot.

Never never land

I walk aimlessly through the streets of Santa Cruz .. a sleepy little northern town nestled between giant redwood trees and the deep blue sea ..I enter Lorenzo woods and hear a mountain side of pine trees hum and sing ..the pine needles bend sun rays that burst into colored light at my visual receptor sites ..I can see the lights of a fairy camp coming from the river banks ..reminds me what a mystical space I’m in ..back on Pacific Avenue there are lots of bicycles, Birkenstocks, paisley covered halter tops and surf board shops ..even this ordinary motel room looks like the Taj Mahal to me ..and I think I see ..in the waves behind my eye lids ..where never-never land might be..

Friday with Ann

I pick her up for lunch ~ and she asks me to fix her remote ~ it only needs a battery so I put it in my pocket for later ~ I comment on the lovely Spanish courtyard outside her place ~ she says she’s not comfortable living there anymore ..all the neighbors are conspiring against her. When I ask why, she says that they’re mostly college students who depend on their parents ..however, they only take one class a semester and they party until dawn so their parents are really supporting their drinking habit. I ask if that bothers her. Yeah, she says, I’ve complained about it so many times that now I’m the one who’s being evicted. That doesn’t make any sense I say ~ she says it happens all the time ..fucking landlords. At lunch, I want to take the time to enjoy my food and listen to her story ..she’s between jobs so I ask her, if she had the opportunity ..what would she like to do the most ~ write a novel, she says ~ fiction or non-fiction, I ask ~ autobiography, she says ~ does writing come easy for you ..or do you struggle with it like me ? ~ easy, she says ~ I tell her what a gift she has ..and ask her if she keeps a journal ~ no, she says ~ so I suggest that she start a blog ~ and she says that she doesn’t want other people reading about her personal life ~ besides, she has no interest in the Internet ..it’s run by a bunch of cocksuckers (Cox cable) and is full of mistakes. She wolfs down her food and rushes me along ~ says she needs to be doing something more productive ..we leave before I am finished ~ I drop her off at her house and drive away ~ she calls to tell me that she can’t find her remote ~ I remember that I have it in my pocket ..so I tell her I’ll drive by radio shack and get a new battery ~ on the way, I take a brisk walk along State street ~ chat with my sister over the phone ~ watch the sunset ~ do some grocery shopping ~ buy a new CD at Borders ~ replace the battery at Radio Shack ~ have a fruit juice at Blenders ~ watch the full moon from the top of a parking structure ~ and return to drop off the remote ~ she invites me in and I sit down on the floor ~ we enjoy a little hashish and I ask her if she would like to hear my new CD ~ it’s not rap or hip hop is it? she asks ~ no, I say ..it’s ‘alternative country’ ..a female duo I saw on one of the late night talk shows ~ she goes on to tell me that she’s always writing Leno to tell him how great his show is ..says he needs that ..she remembers when Letterman had a morning talk show ..she liked him better then .. she’s really bummed about what happened to Stevie Ray Vaughn ..can I imagine what’d be like to die in a helicopter crash ..have I ever been to New York ? ..there’s a street called ‘Maiden Lane’ where the buildings are from the original Dutch settlement ..what’s the matter Lee, don’t you ever watch the ‘History Channel’ ? Meanwhile, I have to admit ..I’ve been listening to the mandolins and thinking about the moon outside.

Chapter four

W o n d e r l a n d

The fairy princess runs with the other children through the grassy hillsides of the disenchanted forest. She shows them how to spin around and around until the sky and ground trade places ..and they fall down laughing. They pick capers for their mother’s goat’s head soup ..run with dandelions petals streaming behind them ..catch tadpoles and have muck fights in the swamp ..she tells them not to drink the mung water ..or eat the purple berries. She tries to ward off words of hostility and protect them from self-loathing. She wants them to remember that, for a bright shining moment, there was a wonderland called childhood.

Continues here ~~> Chapter five

Sun Tsu

I don’t believe we can fight terrorism by using tactics of conventional warfare. Blowing up insurgent strongholds in Iraq doesn’t seem to work. Terrorism just re-forms somewhere else. That’s the nature of networks ..they’re resilient to this type of attack. Their greatest strength is mobility. Damage in one location is easily overcome by re-routing messages somewhere else. All you need is a cellphone. I prefer the strategies of Sun Tzu. A better way to defeat this type of enemy is though deception and misinformation. That’s where networks are most vulnerable ..they’re anonymous. It’s hard to tell who’s really at the other end. I mean, look how easy it is for Dateline NBC to trap sexual predators over the Internet. I say we set up hundreds, perhaps thousands of decoy cells around the world ..staff them with realistic sounding recruiters ..then use their own methods to lure them in. When a terrorist arrives at the door ..Stone Phillips steps out from behind the curtain to greet them.