Progress. Better late than never...

6:32 pm. Up early, wrote till 11:00, cut the lawn, then off to the garage to paint the kitchen baseboards and plinth blocks. Plinth. Always loved that word. First ran into it on Jeff Beck’s solo LP, Truth, back in the sixties. Great songs. Great record. Including maybe the finest instrumental of “Greensleeves” I’ve ever heard, played (as Beck noted somewhere on the album sleeve) on Mickey Most’s guitar.

Anyway, baseboards were primed, old doors and windows were carted off to the ReStore, and much was accomplished. The kitchen cabinets have all been installed, the new appliances are in the garage, waiting to be wired, and things are moving forward.

Found a volume of Richard Brautigan short stories I’d misplaced and had a chance to read a few pages after getting cleaned up. Funny, and deceptively well written. Need to spend more time reacquainting myself with the stories. He’s the sort of writer that inspires you to pick up pen and have at it—kick caution to the curb and spill your guts. 

Life Al Dente...

7:54 pm. Discovering the joys of braces, in small. Picks, brushes, flosses, dyes. More brushes. Threading devices. Want to remember this experience. Been putting myself in the shoes of a teenager and thinking I’ve got it better—lots better—than any kid. No classmates ragging on me. No worries of locking lips, and hardware, with girls. No anything.

Been reading (and enjoying) a book, The Seige, by James Hanna, editor of the Sand Hill Review. Took a small detour this morning to add Tobias Wolff to the mix. Then the opening pages of a slim biography of Jack Dempsey by Toby Smith, a writer who's worked for, among many others, Sports Illustrated. The book’s called Kid Blackie: Jack Dempsey’s Colorado Days. Enjoying it all.

Worked on a couple of stories this morning, including the one about the wayward hunters. Attended to business with the contractors as well, and managed to get in a much-appreciated twenty winks with the cats—both of whom seem appreciative of the new dental work, and both of whom offered their kitty encouragement.

 

Second childhood...

Woke up, went downstairs to talk to the cabinet installer, put in time at the keyboard, then traipsed off to the orthodontist to get braces. Yeah. Braces. After all these years.

Been threatening to write a memoir about my early days in Wisconsin, and think maybe now’s the time to start sorting through my notes. While I’m looking and feeling like a fourteen year old dork. 

Have a lot of good material. Enough to make a book? I don’t know. But as long as I’m in composition-mode, may as well give it a shot. What's the worst that can happen?

Switching gears...

4:40 pm. Thunder and rain. Back home kitchen cabinets are being installed, and a new double door’s being hung in the entryway to the basement. Progress at last!

Enjoyed a good morning composing. Good in the sense that many words found their way to the page. We’ll see how the rest goes. Been having a sluggish go with revisions, so decided to switch gears. Relegate time to drafting rather than rewriting.

A couple of new stories have been floating around in my head. I’m excited to see them on paper. Today’s draft was the start of a piece for which I have high hopes. A story of two inept hunters, lost in the wood (metaphorically speaking), looking for an honorable way home.

 We’ll see where it goes.

The Here and now meets the hereafter

4:59 pm. Cloudy with a small chance of murder. Kitchen cabinets arrived. They’re stowed in the garage, ready for an early morning installation. Eric the Reluctant (carpenter at large) is sanding something—presumably a doorframe—on the back gate of his pickup. He has a Marlboro dangling from his bottom lip, and the glazed look of hard liquor nights in his eyes. Today is the start of week eight, renovation time. The concept of eternity is being played out on my own property with chop saws and nail guns.

Difficult decisions lie ahead. What they will be, no one knows. Meanwhile, there is painting. Lots and lots and lots of painting.

One last word about the road trip. Stopped in the town of San Luis on Sunday, and walked the Stations of the Cross up to the domed church at the top of the mesa. What an unforgettable experience. The bronze sculpture groups, which are 2/3 life size, are beautiful and moving, and seeing them in situ, on the hillside, made them even more so. Would like to go back sometime—Good Friday, maybe—and do it all again.  

Next stop, Santa Fe

9:12 am. Albuquerque. Choking down a cup of motel coffee, making ready for an afternoon jog to Santa Fe. Strange night's sleep. Dreamed of a bull running through my livingroom, tracking meadow muffins everywhere.

 

Holiday weekend...

July 3, 2013. On the road. (No Internet service to post)

Drove west through the Spanish Peaks country of the San Jan valley to the town of Manassa. Home of the legendary boxer, Jack Dempsey.

The Jack Dempsey museum is in Dempsey’s childhood home. A log cabin with a stone fireplace. Admission was free. Out front is a near life-size bronze of the man in his gloves and trunks, a scowl on his face. Inside is a treasure-trove of memorabilia. News clippings, photographs, trophies. Dempsey’s gloves and shoes. A blue ring robe.

Many, many original photos with Dempsey and other celebrities. Heads of state. Movie stars. Sports figures. A copy of the George Bellows’ oil, “Dempsey and Firpo,” hanging on one of the walls.

A city park (you guessed it, Jack Dempsey Park) skirts the east side of the cabin. Away on a fence on the south side is a billboard-sized painting of Dempsey, alone in the ring, headlined the “Manassa Mauler.”

A small woman with black hair and a kind smile was looking after things. She was well informed on the topic of Dempsey’s life. Bought some postcards and a book about Dempsey before leaving.

Manassa is twenty miles from state highway 101. You travel though high desert county much like southwest Wyoming to get there. The town is in a small green valley circled by mountains. Hard, pretty land.

Along the way, saw a deer standing in alfalfa field. The alfalfa was chest high, and she seemed to be catching the mist off a nearby irrigation pipe while she fed. In San Luis, saw a marijuana dispensary called La Casa Cannabis.

 

July 4th Post:

Found a place called the "Greater World Earthship Community" on the road between Taos and Albuquerque. Adobe castles made of wine bottles, discarded tires, and glass. Several helpings of wine are not making the description any easier. In fact, I'm reminded of a scene (I don't know why)  in the Beatles's first movie, "A Hard Day's Night," when a curmudgeonly man on a train says to Ringo Starr, "I fought the war for your sort," and Ringo replies, "I bet you're sorry you won." Happy Independence Day to all!

Stuck in the doldrums...

Burning bushes are in the ground. Next on the agenda, a ton of dirt to smooth over the peaks and valleys left behind by the tree removal and stump grinding men. Then grass seed. Will have to wait for next spring to pass judgment on what we’ve done to the yard.

Same holds for the neighbors. Everybody on the block got hit hard by the big hailstorm back in May, so we’re all taking turns having things repaired or replaced. Another new roof went up across the street. A partial down the block. Ours comes in the fall, when the kitchen renovation’s finished.

Been working like hell, but having a hard time getting enthusiastic about anything. Not sure why. Maybe it’s the gloomy weather…or the general feeling that, despite the wheels turning, we don’t seem to be going anywhere. Anyway, nothing’s fun right now. Not even reading.

Maybe I'm amazed...

Interview of Joy Williams in the new Paris Review. Won’t have time to read it until tomorrow. (Five unplanted burning bushes are awaiting the spade.)

Recall Williams once saying that a writer should be smart, but not too smart. Dumb enough to break himself to harness.

Remember Ray Carver saying something similar. That writers don't need to be the smartest guy on the block. Just smart enough to be amazed by simple things.

Those words hit me this morning when I got after a badly-written paragraph, ripped it apart, and discovered a good story beneath. 

 

Wood, and Other Observations...

7:44 pm. Just back from a walk around the neighborhood. House smells of glue and sealing agents thanks to the hardwood floor men who put in a good half day’s work before packing up and driving off to the corner tavern.

It would probably be right to feel sorrow for the oak trees who gave their lives to become the kitchen floor, but seven weeks into the renovation, there is no quarter asked or given. It’s every tree-hugging son of an acorn to himself!

Scarred for life...

Woke to the sound of the neighbor’s weed whacker after a long deep sleep. A beautiful, sunny morning. Had coffee on the porch swing, then went off to do a bit of reading and writing. Made more progress revising a story that’s bedeviled me for weeks, then called it quits in favor of a movie.

Highs in the 90s with lots of big cumulus clouds. A clear sky despite the new fire down in Canon City. The scar on the mountain is so green it’s hard to believe it’s almost July. Looks lush, compared to the foothills.

I remember moving here decades ago and wondering about that scar. Couldn’t believe it when I was told it was a gravel quarry. Not gold, not uranium, but ordinary gravel used by landscapers. A great big gash, right there on the face of the city.

I’m used to the scar now. But only in the way you get used to looking at yourself in the mirror. Eyes learning not to linger too long on the bad parts. Like Cormac McCarthy says, “Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”

Things are looking up...

Two days painting the kitchen ceiling. Haven’t had my eyes fixed in a heavenward direction in a while, and was made to pay for it.

Michelangelo complained of growing a goiter while working his gig in the Sistine. My ailments are relegated to the neck and back, but I can sympathize.

A good buddy sent me a recording of Richard Burton reading Dylan Thomas’s “The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower.” That lovely poem did what a bottle of Advil couldn’t.

Paintin sucks. It sucks powerful...

Where did the day go? Up early to answer mail and write a few lines, then down to what used to be the kitchen to do some work with the paintbrush. Two gallons of primer and six hours later it’s still not finished. Worst part is, the ceiling hasn’t had a single coat.

Remember Tom Sawyer?

“Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit.”

That pretty much says it all.

Time for the giant Heineken that’s stashed in the fridge.

 

Writ in water...

Breakfast on the porch swing. Front-page headline in the paper reported the Garden of the Gods as the number one park in the country. Page two carried a less happy story about the body of a sixty-two year old kayaker found in the Arkansas River near Wellsville yesterday. According to the dispatch, the man was wearing protective gear and navigating an inflatable craft he’d launched in Salida. He was the fifth person to drown in the river in two weeks.

Here in the west, people have a powerful fascination with water (ostensibly, because there isn’t enough of it to go around), so a dynamic tension exists among sporting folks, ranchers, and ecologists, each group laying claim (legal and otherwise) to the state’s most precious natural resource. 

“Whisky is for drinking...” Mark Twain is supposed to have said, “...water is for fighting.” But it’s difficult to appreciate just how deep the conflicts run until one group crosses oars, or pistols, or subpoenas with the other. I finished a novel last spring that touches on the (true) story of a young girl—an experienced rafting guide—who drowned in the Arkansas one spring, whose body lay trapped in an underwater sieve for months while various groups and agencies bickered over the legal “stewardship” of water in which she’d been entombed.

Naturally, the book hasn’t sold. But it isn’t the cruelty of the story, I think, that’s kept it from being picked up. (The publishing industry perfected cruelty if they didn’t invent it.) Instead, I’ve come to believe it’s because no one living east of the Missouri believes such a thing could happen. Water, when you have it, is the easiest thing in the world to take for granted. 

William Kittredge and me...

Week six of the kitchen renovation. Highlight of the day was seeing the giant roll-off hauled away to the dump. No, wait. Rewind. The highlight of the day was the William Kittredge essay I read, “Drinking & Driving” in this week’s edition of Narrative. A fine piece about the author’s early years in Missoula.

I’ve had my stuff published in the same magazines as Kittredge twice now. Maybe more, I don’t know. The first time was in the Talking River Review. The second was Narrative. Meditations on those sorts of things make for powerful longings. They also serve as a gentle nod, letting you know you’re on the right track. 

Word wrangling...

Lazy day. Worked on a story this morning, did some long-overdue cleanup of my files this afternoon. Had the occasion (I’m speaking necessity here) to look up a few of my old pieces—including two posted on this sight—and thought, wow, that’s odd. Ranching and writing don’t seem all that dissimilar. They’re both a hard, lonely existence, beset with incessant frustration and intolerable BS. The only difference is, ranching occasionally pays a living wage.

 

Saturday night special...

First day in a long time I haven’t put a word on paper. Stayed up all night, restlessly awaiting a thief who never came, then rose early in a bleary attempt to sell all the things on the lawn he didn’t bother to steal. No time to write.

Spent the day saying goodbye to things that had outlived their usefulness. Some that had outlived their grip on the heart. Farewell to all! Bon chance! Arrivaderla! Tomorrow, as Mr. Milton said, “…to fresh woods and pastures new."