Real Indians (or: Indians in the Streets)

From Tulsa to Amarillo first:

"Met Dick Harding downtown." Okay then. 

Borden's was a local chain of cafeterias in Tulsa. One of the founders had an excellent sense of humor. "“Through diligence, hard work and careful planning,” Leroy Borden would later say, “we lost money from the start.”

It's surreal to retrace these travels as the fam unit heads west, as this is basically I-40, along which I have traveled in both directions dozens of times. Shamrock. Prairies like an ocean. Seafood and beef on the hoof. Frozen. No trace of the New Western Motel, deluxe ranch style. Long gone. 

Exit prairie, enter desert. Ha, Cline's Corners. I wonder if there was any discussion of a side trip to Santa Fe. 

The De Anza is another one of those Route 66 motels that ended up being considered historic, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2004. Renovation finally began on the property in November, 2017, after many years of various attempts. The project is expected to cost at least $8 million. 

La Placita is of course still there, still serving food. Still with the famous huge cottonwood tree in the middle of one of the rooms, as noted above. And, apparently, haunted. 

Along with the typed notes from my grandfather, apparently it was my great aunt who hand wrote many notes as well. 

Particularly charmed to see mention of "Sopapias," with honey. 

Apparently my grandfather was offended by the residents of Gallup, whereas my great aunt, at least in Winslow, was thrilled. 

Both observations remind me of so much racist and imperialist, genocidal iconography from my childhood. "Playing cowboys and Indians" was a pastime. The Indians always lost. The stupid television show, F Troop, comes to mind. The blockbuster epic, How the West Was Won, as well. That orgy of white supremacy came out in 1962, and I distinctly recall hating it at age 3 or 4, when the family went to see it at a local drive-in movie theater. Our travelers here reveal the ignorance of Pueblo versus Navajo or any other distinction. The mythology of white European settlers as the good guys was in full swing with television shows like The Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy and the Roy Rodgers show. I can see why, for people from a small coal mining town in anthracite country Pennsylvania, "real Indians" would be notable. And why old grandad would use the racist term "injuns." Family mythology has my great aunt as an educated woman of the world, and there are distinct differences between her take on things and my grandfather's.

The Wigwam is still up and running in Holbrook, with vintage cars parked in front of each ridiculous structure. 

The El Rancho in Flagstaff is long gone, but looks like yet another of the old classic Route 66 motels. 

The family calls my Uncle Bud in LA-- "We're in Flagstaff and on our way." 

I'm reminded that the word "katabasis" has two distinct meanings. The first, in the sense I use it in the title of this blog, is a descent into the Underworld. The second is a trip from the center of a country to the coast. 

Mockingbird, Mockingbird

Look at this little bastard. Mimos polyglottos, you are a desperate, desperate soul.

There are a few of these guys in the neighborhood now. I have only ever had one around at a time in the past. It surprises me that three or maybe even four of these birds are within earshot, since they tend to be highly territorial. Maybe there's some kind of weird demographic bottleneck of a surplus of males all hollering endlessly for the attentions of a very few females. From the sound of it, they are all desperately ineffectual and the female birds can't be bothered. Because they never shut the fucking fuck up. Loud, obstreperous, unpleasant and crazy-making even in the singular, ridiculous with three or four of them pitching their most urgent pick up lines all afternoon, all night long and into the dawn. Fortunately, for the most part, with the air conditioner on, they are inaudible. I was half hoping that the 30 feral cats in my neighborhood would gang up on these warbling monsters and kill every last one of them, but the other day I saw a badass mockingbird attacking a cat repeatedly, and the cat trying not to run but also obviously cowed and humbled, head down, slinking along guiltily, an embarrassment to his tribe. 

Perhaps Jung would say that one reason I hate these fucking birds so much is that they remind me of myself. If you spot it, you got it, hurr durrrrr. But he'd be partly right. Their attempts to communicate are endless, they refuse to give up, they seem to hope for a response at all times, and yet, from the sound of their uninterrupted stream of bird gibberish and desperate bird-verbal  inventive and ornate posturing, to no avail. Or to little avail. Intermittent reinforcement is the most powerful kind. So I suppose every third day or some shit one of these little noise machines gets laid and shuts the fuck up for a minute. 

This all goes to a few themes lately for me. Since I've been banned for 30 days from Facebook for posting this photo: 

I've had a lot of time to detach from the Facebook mindset, for real. I tried to disengage back on June 1, but then the family separation at the border outrage hit and I waded back into the fray. The universe may have said, well, no-- and thus the ban. Who knows? If it goes against the Facebook "community standards" to post a pic of triumphant American soldiers holding a captured Nazi flag, then isn't that a sign of some kind? Jk. It's just their idiot filter bot, thinking I am a white supremacist. But that in itself is a sign, right?

Anyway, with even more distance from Facebook than before, I have started to get perspective on the shape of my addiction. Simply, Facebook created the illusion for me of being heard and being seen. Here's an amazing thing, I'll post it, look! Some likes, reactions, hearts. Ah, an audience. To call all Facebook addicts narcissists is overly broad, but performers? Stage hogs? Attention seekers? More like it. And in these shithole times of fucking awful stupidity and emerging authoritarianism, it's okay to want to sit around the campfire and tell tales. Shared pain is halved, they say. Times are painful. 

The downside is the biofeedback intensifying spiral of despair, and the reshaping of a community into a cabal of constantly outraged, constantly grieving and offended, constantly horrified pawns in an endless troll war. That's a big downside. 

Bringing a little more detail

Underscoring the just slightly upper middle class but sort of rebellious and daring elements of the family trip from 1951: it turns out the car was a new 1950 Chevrolet convertible, lemon yellow no less, 3 speed manual transmission on the column, with a surprisingly weak 90 hp six cylinder engine. This exact same model was owned, in mint condition, by the estate of Steve McQueen and sold for $84,000 at a recent auction. 

It's a thing of beauty.

What a great car to take from Pennsylvania to Los Angeles and back. But definitely with an edge of conspicuous consumption combined with a playboy sort of flair. My grandfather's midlife crisis car, I guess. 

In an example of how television advertising probably played a role in the choice of car and the idea of an epic road trip, Dinah Shore's jingle ran from 1950 to 1963. 




Life is completer. 

Thanks Dinah, and a great touch having the Chevy logo be a blown kiss at the end. She does, indeed, make it sound very inviting. 

There's also an element of post war giddiness and relief. The eternally dissatisfied quandaries of bored white American young men as reflected in Kerouac's On The Road, that sad and ominous foreshadowing of the incredible social and political upheaval of the '60s and beyond, was still six years in the future. This road trip happened securely in that brief window of time after WWII where the United States (for white people anyway) was a haven of the greatest hopes for humanity and justice. Not so much for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, for example, who were convicted of espionage and sentenced to death in 1951. 

What many music historians think of as the first rock n roll song, Rocket 88, was recorded in 1951. How fitting that it was a love song to a car. 




In another weird turn of events, while my folks were on the road, the US Census Bureau announced it was using the UNIVAC I computer, the first widely available commercial computer, for all of its data analysis. 

Another detail I found out via email interview with my mother: the trip began the day after her graduation from high school. My father was in Ashland Pennsylvania the entire summer, before his junior year at Nebraska, working two jobs in construction and driving an ice cream truck. So from June 8 to July 11, my progenitors endured their separation, especially poignant since they were separated for the entire academic calendar as it was. So, the trip of a lifetime with relatively hip and generous parents in a yellow Chevy convertible was also an imposition and a heartache for my mother. 

A Live Bull with 4 eyes, 4 horns and 2 noses

It's weird to remember that there were several oil booms in Pennsylvania. By the time of this trip, all the wells had run dry and a few derricks were left as monuments or curiosities. Ironically, Washington PA is now one of the largest fracking operations in the United States. 

Zanesville Ohio has a very early rust belt tale:

The city grew, with factories making pottery, bricks, glassware, ball-bearings, soap, steel and many others from the 1880s until the mid-1950s. The City had a booming downtown. By the 1950s many factories closed or moved. Pottery, a major employer, slowly lost out to cheaper Asian companies. From the 1950s till the 1980s the City lost about 1/3 of its population. (Wiki)

It looks like the Maramor Restaurant in Columbus, Ohio was quite a place. "Trip nearly ended here!" enthuses my grandfather.

From this website with the history of the restaurant:  

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas may have eaten at The Maramor during their 1934 visit to Columbus. It seems likely that Alice was referring to it when she wrote: “In Columbus, Ohio, there was a small restaurant that served meals that would have been my pride if they had come to our table from our kitchen. The cooks were women and the owner was a woman and it was managed by women. The cooking was beyond compare, neither fluffy nor emasculated, as women’s cooking can be, but succulent and savoury.”

$2.00 roughly the same as $19 now

I was curious about the noted "lime frosts" from the Maramor, especially interested if they were alcoholic drinks at lunch time, just to get a feel for that. The menu calls the drink a "fresh minted lime freeze," which does sound refreshing for a June day, but it's clearly non-alcoholic. A set of four menus from the Maramor from the 1950's sold for $100 on eBay. If only an entire archive of all these mementos existed in a family attic. I'd be rich. 

A quick stop to visit the birthplace of James Whitcomb Riley. The only observation: white fence. 

And the Shamrock looks like a fairly swanky motel, "- but, $16." 

Very clean city, but lots of colored people, says good old honky grandad, of St. Louis. The racism of my ancestors was a de facto and unprocessed reality. My maternal grandmother called Brazil nuts "n***** toes," even as late as the late '70s. Fewer than three years before this trip, Truman issued the executive order to desegregate the armed forces. Brown v. Board of Education was 3 years in the future. I'm sure my grandfather thought it was respectful and not racist at all to use the phrase "colored people," while being totally unconscious that he found it remarkable in some way that the black population of St. Louis was large. 

It sounds like they had a great time.

It's also interesting that cowboys in cowboy hats featured in the narrative. In a marked way, St. Louis was and is the Gateway. 

Ben Stanley's Cafe on Highway 66:

My maternal grandmother's nickname was Toots. I have no idea why. I remember that my Uncle Bud used to call her that, rather than mom, which seemed funny to me at the time. It looks like she bought some moonshine in the Ozarks. 

The repeated references to Duncan Hines have nothing to do with cake or brownie mixes, but with his early series of publications recommending restaurants and lodging across America. He was the pioneer of this idea in the US, for white people. Black people had the Green Book, first published in 1936, which had an even more important purpose: letting black people know where the safe, non-racist places were to stay or to dine. 

From Wiki:

Hines worked as a traveling salesman for a Chicago printer, and he had eaten many meals on the road across the United States by 1935 when he was 55. At this time, there was no American interstate highway system and only a few chain restaurants, except in large populated areas. Therefore, travelers depended on getting a good meal at a local restaurant. Hines and his wife Florence began assembling a list for friends of several hundred good restaurants around the country.

The book proved so successful that Hines added another which recommended lodging. 

The Will Rogers Memorial was closed. You can sense the disappointment. 

Tulsa Oklahoma, "A clean, modern city." 

The more I dig to find the traces of the lodging and restaurants from 67 years ago, the more it occurs to me that my mother's side of the family definitely had a sense of their class situation. Mid-level but quality lodging (no mention yet of truly swanky hotels) and expensive restaurants, but an eye for "the best" as well as a hint of the delight that comes from "slumming." There's an accounting sheet with every single meal written down, so it will be interesting to check that out. But a grand total of $900 for food and lodging is a huge, huge splurge for 1951. The same purchasing power that about $8000 has now. 

Our intrepid travelers made it to Tulsa, where it starts to feel like the West when I do road trips, in three days. I'm reminded that, in the book Alcoholics Anonymous, published only 12 years before this epic, Bill Wilson refers to Akron Ohio as "a western city." 

Road Trip, or Chasing Family Shades Across America

On June 8th, 1951, my maternal grandparents and my mother (and maybe my great aunt) set out on a road trip from Ashland, PA (the land of my ancestors) to Los Angeles and back. The main goal of the trip was to visit my uncle Bud in Los Angeles, but there were a great many stops and tourist activities both out and back. The trip spanned June 8th to July 11th. 

The first page of my grandfather's notes on their road trip

My grandfather meticulously typed out all of his notes for each day of the trip, after they got home I assume. He was an engineer and I guess he had a very keen eye for detail and data. A few observations about this very first page: how did he account for the single extra mile? When he wrote "loaded with luggage and things," he definitely was not kidding, as I know my maternal grandmother liked to travel in style. I recall, even for a two week trip to the Jersey Shore when I was a kid, that she would pack an entire steamer trunk and several hat boxes. She and my father got into a heated exchange one year when she insisted on bringing her mink stole. Of course, she won out, as she always did. Also, charming how it was notable that they had sandwiches at 11 pm, and that probably two motel rooms totaled $14 (roughly equivalent to $140 now). 

An old postcard of the Roof Garden Motel in Somerset. Long gone, but there remains a Roof Garden Market in Somerset, maybe on the same property. 

My maternal grandmother's side of the family came from money as they say,she was older she was basically penniless. I know that her father, my maternal great grandfather, was a lawyer in New York. But I know little else. My maternal grandfather was well paid, I remember hearing. He was, I think, a mining engineer. I remember that their house in Ashland was large and seemed to front some of the trappings of being upper middle class. But whatever the money situation was, that side of the family seems to have lost it all. I hope they enjoyed themselves while losing it. I do know that the final tally for the lodging and meals for this particular road trip was $900, which had the same purchasing power as $8,700 today. 

I don't know why my uncle was in LA, but it turns out his apartment was only about 4 miles from my first apartment in LA, so cue eerie music. He also struggled with alcoholic drinking his whole life. He seemed like a good guy, but he also seemed kind hapless and out of it a lot of the time. I never got to know him very well. When I was younger, I found it very peculiar that he and my Aunt Lila lived under the same roof, in Hatboro PA, but never slept in the same room. 

I never met my maternal grandfather, as he died before I was born. I think he died of emphysema in his late 50's, but I'm not certain. My mother has occasionally mentioned that he was a party guy, drank and smoked a lot, and wrote tin pan alley tunes. I have the original sheet music for one of his ditties and I'll have to scan and post it sometime. 

A trip all the way across the country with no interstates, no chain fast food, no chain hotels. How strange to think of an America where almost all business was local business, everywhere. Gasoline, of course, had become franchised, but that was about it. It looks like the average speed every day was maybe 50 mph. I want to know which car they were in. I think my mother was 18. I know she has said she was quite unhappy about the trip, and spent the entire time pining for my father, who was 19. 

Maps and No Maps

Part of my maternal grandfather's road map, showing various routes he had traced out

I went down a few YouTube rabbit holes over the past few days, looking for new music. I'll be on a road trip for the entire month of July and it'll be good to have new music to listen to in the rental car. One of these days. I'll actually buy a car with air conditioning and a stereo, but anyway. 

My first and last love is jazz from about 1945 to about 1998 or so. But I also have long admired all sorts of other music, of course, and I often want to know what is emerging, what's new. (ish, since it does take a few years sometimes for stuff to percolate to awareness). I often go long stretches listening to a lot of the old jazz recordings I have-- Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Anthony Braxton, tons of the Blue Notes from the '60s, etc. But every now and then I just want to clear my aural palate (palette) and get to the strange new stuff that is being done. 

I have no idea what led me to Jamie xx and the video for his track, Gosh, directed by Romain Gavras. It's set in Tianducheng China, a weird almost ghost town with replicas of parts of Paris. It features albino people (including the unforgettable face of Hassan Kone), hundreds of Chinese boys with bleached hair, from a Shaolin martial arts academy, a bitchin' Subaru and plenty of weirdness. All of it is in camera, no CGI, and the drone footage is extremely well done. 

It turns out that the Jamie xx CD that the track is from, In Colour, is excellent. I don't usually get very enthused about EDM or house music, but some of it is interesting, including this one. 

Lots of other new stuff. Young Fathers' new one, Cocoa Sugar, keeps growing on me, and I think it will be recognized as one of those "greatest albums of all times" recordings, down the line. They have two earlier albums, Dead and White Men are Black Men Too, and both of those are excellent, but it feels like every track of Cocoa Sugar is crafted perfectly, like they hit their stride and found the bullseye on each of the approaches they have taken in the past. It's much more of a pop record than their earlier two, which some fans will probably grumble about. But that's the way of things. I'd love to know more about how they create the surprising and dense music-scapes for their songs. 



More minimalist dance music, from South Africans OKZharp and Manthe Ribane. There's a full length first album coming out in July. The dance troupe is called Intellectuals Pantsula, and the choreography is beautiful, as well as the editing. 




Ambient/EDM minimalism from Lusine, who I just heard of but who has been putting out records for almost 20 years. Another one of those solo guys who uses a stage name. In the video, it's remarkable how the lighting is used. 



Definitely not my usual taste, this synth pop/dream pop band from the UK. But I love the arrangements and the mood. It'll make good road music. 



South African duo FAKA, also only at the EP stage of things, but recently tapped by Versace to provide music for the runway, so probably much more widely known soon. 




It's a big weird world out there. As painful and weird as the internet can be, I'm grateful that one can just go up on YouTube and, without any map or destination, try all sorts of new music. I guess the same is true with Spotify, but I haven't used that. Plus, I still really enjoy watching music videos, which, in many cases, have become elaborate, expensive and a very high art form. 

War, compartmentalized

I had a weird dystopian nightmare two nights ago that there was a war going on. But it was happening simultaneously with ordinary life, and the people who were being attacked were within existing cities and towns. But the general population was so insulated somehow, spatially, and numbed out, not paying attention, that very few people knew there was even a war happening. I hiked very high up onto a mountain outside the town where I was living, and from that vantage point you could see individual people being attacked, shot, houses burned down, large groups of people arrested, taken away in vans. But you could also see everyone else just going about their ordinary day, side by side with all of it. 

A scenario where, for some of the population, a war is being waged on them, and for others within the same population, they are not involved and/or refuse to get involved. When I went back down to town, I could see it all from ground level. A person would be walking and right behind them would be one of the people on whom the war was being waged, shot and killed. The person in front would just keep walking, not even a flinch or backward look. Or a person would get into a car and begin to drive away, and right in front of them, the army would pull over a car, and kill everyone inside, but the first person would just keep driving, as if not even seeing what had happened. 

I tried yelling out to a few of the numb people (for some reason, sitting in a park watching a backgammon game), "Hey did you even know there was a war going on?" and they just laughed at a joke one of them had told and refused to look at me. One of them eventually did look at me and her face was utterly cold and empty. 

I suddenly knew I was in serious trouble and would have to go home, pack my stuff and try to hide out. I suddenly felt like I had crossed over into the group of victims of war. As I walked more and more briskly to my apartment, a couple army guys blocked my way on the sidewalk, one of them tapping a truncheon into his open palm. The other one pointed to a police wagon. The back doors were open and there were maybe 15 people already in there. I recognized friends and relatives. The army guy pointed again. I turned and started to run, footsteps behind me. 

That's when I woke up to the early sunrise. 

This all is somewhat how I am feeling these days, especially if the "town" is the planet itself. The unaware or numb people are Americans, basically. Or within America, a lot of white people. Because if you talk to a lot of people of color or other marginalized people, they feel like there's a war going on. But it seems like most white people are oblivious. But also, in general America is oblivious to the ways that America is waging war all over the world. It was wild how, as soon as I knew what was going on, I was the enemy also. This does seem to be the way this war works. Those waging it only ask of the general populace that they mind their own business. "This doesn't concern you." 

And it seems we are often only too happy to oblige. 

It's weird to see ugly chapters of our history play out in real time. We've had the opportunity to look into the distant past to see children torn from their families by Christian missionaries, or by slave traders, or Nazis. There's something oddly numbing and reassuring about looking into the past, and thinking to oneself that such horrifying and inhumane events can't happen now, or here. But of course, recent events at our border give the lie to that sentiment. And what sort of person would hear that children are being torn from their mothers and fathers and siblings and be okay with it? I don't know, except that I know I ran into dozens on Facebook in the past week or so. Not just okay with it, but happy about it. "Serves them right." I think, for me, sometimes the bigger horror or at least as big a horror is how heartlessly and cruelly some people are, in reaction to suffering. Regarding the suffering itself, my heart easily opens to those who are suffering, and I feel empathy, along with my outrage. But regarding the heartless and cruel reaction, the utter indifference is terrifying and traumatizes me. This is how it looks when a culture creates informers, torturers, executioners. The cold, vacant, utterly indifferent stare. 

Here and now. But compartmentalized in strange ways, where it is still possible for the vast majority of people to go about their ordinary lives and "not be bothered" by what is "not their problem." 

Here and now.  

I'm Afraid I Can't Do That, Dave

The 70 mm re-release of 2001:A Space Odyssey is at my local theater and I went this afternoon. 

When this film was re-released in 1974, I was 12 years old. I went to the Boyd Theater in Bethlehem Pennsylvania and saw it probably a dozen or more times. It had a profound, deeply strange effect on me. How my 12 year old hyperactive self was able to sit, showing after showing, through the endlessly slow pacing is beyond me. But, at the time, I was riveted by every minute. 

Seeing the film in the theater again today, it was as if my 12 year old self was sitting next to me. But my 50 something self was watching as well, and seeing some completely different things. Recognizing, for example, that this film, set 17 years ago, was so optimistic about our boundless technological prowess. That there are no scenes of what is going on, on Earth, nor any mention of anything related to Earth life, other than Floyd Heywood's phone call to his daughter. That maybe my early sense of extremely dry satire arose in part from the film's juxtaposition of humans and Hal. That the film is 100% racist and sexist, with nary a person of color to be seen and no women in any central role, not even any women astronauts. 

My 12 year old self was enthralled again, and kept saying, wow, here comes a cool part. Oh yeah, I love this part. Hey, old man, watch this! Oh no, not this part, so suspenseful!

But I also noted that a lot of what I thought was cool when I was 12 was truly harrowing and disturbing to my older self. There was a much greater sense of the hellish isolation of the crew members on the Jupiter mission. Of the weird, officious and hollow lives of all the bureaucrats. And I also felt, quite sharply, my pangs of pragmatism when I knew my 12 year old self believed all of it, thought all of it was definitely possible if not even inevitable, and that 2001 was an incredibly long time into the future. Some of what we've done technologically is more advanced, at least in style, than what is featured in the film, but for the most part, we still seem more like the hominids in the prologue than the sophisticated, rational and intelligent humans in space. 

I still marvel at the story, the special effects, the timing and Kubrick's impeccable sense of art. But it's sad, really, to fast forward more than 40 years in my own life and more than 40 years in the history of our benighted species, and feel acutely, on both counts, the ravages of time. How much of our incredible potential is wasted on war, oligarchy, racism, sexism and regression. Getting and spending, our whole species lays waste its powers. Incredible things have occurred, it's true, since 1974, but I'm feeling, pessimistically, that we are quite stuck now. 

weirdness. es.

Santa Fe seems weirder and weirder to me every time I visit. This particular visit, maybe some of the weirdness was amplified by 7 nights in an Airbnb casita way out in Eldorado. One or more daily trips into and out of town meant that I was never immersed in the weirdness, but reminded of it afresh each time. I think it's also the case that my many years in Phoenix have made Santa Fe seem more and more surreal. Phoenix is in some ways just plain old America. Santa Fe not only feels like it is not part of the United States, but also not exactly on Planet Earth.

I rarely hang out in downtown Santa Fe during peak tourist season, so I think that's part of it as well. These past few days, the plaza and the entire downtown area have been swarming with people visiting from all over the world. I stood outside Cafe Pasqual's the other night, people watching, and people from Germany, Japan, Belgium, France, the UK, Mexico, Iowa all came up to read the menu. Many decided to go in, only to come right back out muttering about the 90 minute wait. Some of the visitors gave off a content enough vibe, or had that sense of adventure about them. Most, however, and of course I could have been projecting, looked flatly miserable. I suspect some people come to Santa Fe with a certain budget in mind for their visit and slowly begin to realize they should have doubled it. Many people look anxious, harried and disappointed. I talked briefly with a couple on the plaza yesterday on their honeymoon, from Edinburgh. They asked me to take their picture. I congratulated them on getting married. "Oh we got married 4 years ago and have been saving up for this." Nice, where are you staying? "The Inn of the Anasazi, around the block there. $450 a night! It's very nice though."

A superior king room at the Inn of the Anasazi. $520 a night. 

I had a spectacular dinner with the loml at Sazon the other night. (A friend recently messaged me and asked, "What is the loml?" "The love of my life. Sometimes the lomfl. The love of my fucking life." "Oh. That's cute.") Another great dinner solo at La Boca. The food here in town seems to be getting better, if anything, and it's always been a solid food town. Traffic is awful. People drive like idiots. 

I think what has also happened, quite strongly, is a definite fissure between old tourist Santa Fe (which started feeling like a facsimile and than a facsimile of that facsimile in the '90s) and real Santa Fe, where real people live. It was always thus, but with the advent of Meow Wolf's House of Eternal Return and some other diffusion of culture, it feels more like two distinct towns now. I love the fact that it feels especially like a whole town has risen up for younger people. Because old tourist Santa Fe is absolutely not for younger people, judging from the people watching I have been doing. I don't think it ever was. 

I had been hoping to hike extensively up in the National Forest, but it's closed. It was unseasonably 91 degrees the other day. Some soft rains rolled in yesterday though and took the edge off. 

It's weird to have lived here for 30 years, on and off, and to be a visitor now. Since roughly 2009 or so, I haven't longed to return the way I did every other time I left. It just feels like it is too difficult to live here, realistically. The low cost of living in the Valley of Hell is a marked contrast with here, and I always struggled desperately here, financially. This was often just because I am terrible with money, and I was an active alcoholic here for years, but it is also because the town is financially challenging. Low salaries, high cost of living, low job security. And the music scene is very hardscrabble here, and had become quite insulated by the time I left. The same people playing the same shows with the same audiences, over and over. 

An old friend of mine here bailed on education about a decade ago and became a plumbing apprentice. He's a licensed plumber with additional HVAC certification now and he makes six figures. Of course he works 90 hours a frikkin week. But I think, if one isn't a financially successful artist, trades are another way to make this area work. It's hilarious regarding me though, since if I merely get a wrench out of a tool kit, I break something. I have no acumen for successful interaction with the mechanical world. I do romanticize being blue collar though. Especially after 4 years of a PhD program. 

This has been a great visit. Extremely anti-social. The only other human being I've seen is the loml, pretty much, and that has only been for a couple hours at a time. I hope to return in August, when I may have a free place to stay, and get out more. 

you can't handle the truth

When 8 out of 11 tarot are major arcana, the story says "it's not personal, it's just fate." Since the major arcana are archetypes, they have an Olympian quality, largely indifferent to the scramblings of the mortal pips or the sort of demigod court cards. As is the case with all archetypes, they manifest in one's personal affairs, but they are dangerous delusions if taken as identical with oneself, other people or situations. As the Greeks would have it, we are mere bread-eaters. 

I'm an odd one when it comes to the mantic arts. A down-to-the-ground skeptic, I also get something out of astrology, tarot and the I Ching. I stop short of massacring birds to read their still writhing guts, but I wanted to do so this morning to the loud ass bird out the window. I threw rocks at it instead and it seems to have gotten the message. 

The fact of the matter is that the process of interacting intuitively with systems of symbols wakes up something in my creative imagination. People always want to know if these old systems are "true" or if they are "real" or whatever else. Of course they're not. Are fairy tales true? Are dreams real? It's like looking at a metaphor and asking if it's literal. The proper response to such questions is, what are you, an idiot? 

I perceive we've lost the capacity for a lot of dream life, waking or sleeping. Which is weird, since I also think many of us are in a sort of constant nightmare of surreality and terror. On social media, I've noticed that many people do not have the capacity to read for nuance, subtext, double meaning, irony, sarcasm or symbol. It is as if people's fear or uncertainty has led them to treat language as a series of blunt, solid objects that mean exactly what they say. But this is a grave error, since language by its inherent nature is metaphor. Nothing ever said means what it says, and nothing can be said that is real or true. Change my mind. 

The old image of language being the finger pointing at the moon, and the person who lacks imagination staring at the finger. 

It gets frustrating enough that it's my middle finger, sometimes. 

Anyway, it's also hilarious. That human beings believe our puny little consciousness is capable of grasping reality. Laughable. We get glimpses that terrify us, and then we instantly erect walls of fear-based certainty. That's the history of religion, but also science, in a nutshell. The smug atheist is as certain as the most benighted superstition-ist. The goal of all of it is certainty. That's our little delusional clam shell. 

Our greatest accomplishments remain metaphor. Quantum mechanics, Newtonian physics, the entire body of our scientific knowledge, our mathematical insights, our technological applications. Metaphor. Never the thing itself. The thing itself still exists, whether we have a way to describe, "explain," or control. Science and mathematics are as much based on unprovable axioms as anything we create. All of our conscious knowledge comes from a ground of postulates, axioms and givens that cannot be proved. All systems are based on assumptions. 

So of course these weirdling old systems of symbols aren't true. Nothing is. 

Hatchetation

On this date in 1900, Carry Nation traveled from her home in Medicine Rock Kansas, to Kiowa, with a wagon full of rocks and a hatchet. She went to Dobson's Saloon and hurled the rocks through the windows and then went inside with her hatchet and smashed every bottle of booze she could and destroyed many of the other interior fixtures. When she had had enough, she said "God be with you" to the owner and left. 

She embarked on a campaign of destruction of saloons which she christened "hatchetation." 

She described herself as "a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn't like."

Her tombstone epitaph: "She Hath Done What She Could."

The lesson in all of this is glaringly obvious. 

Reformers and fanatics of all kinds could take note of all of this, and take note of the end result of all of it, and learn something. But, of course, one of the hallmarks of a reformer and fanatic is the inability to learn from history. In this case, Al Anon, with its extraordinary insight into acceptance of the behavior of others, wasn't founded until 40 years after Nation's death, 31 years after the passing of the 18th Amendment and 18 years after its repeal. Hindsight shows that no amount of moralizing, hatchetation, Bible thumping, maniacal evangelicism, prohibition or any other damn thing made a bit of difference in the face of alcoholism and "the evils of drink." In fact, many of these desperate and agonized and inflamed actions had the opposite effect. Dr. Bob describes how, when the 18th Amendment was passed in 1920, he figured he was safe and it would cure his alcoholism, so he laid in a huge store of booze beforehand and determined to drink it all and then quit. But of course, he ended up drinking more during Prohibition than he had before, because that's exactly the kind of thing an alcoholic would do. And he decided to drink the worst kind of bathtub rotgut and homemade beer because that's also what alcoholics do. 

On the other hand, normal people responded the way normal people do. Alcohol consumption during the 1920's was half that of the preceding decade. The rate of cirrhosis was also cut in half. But by 1930, things started to even out, consumption began to climb back to pre-Prohibition levels and the misery of course went on unabated. 

The term "bootlegger" first appeared in 1889, and seems to have first meant someone who hid a knife or a weapon in their high boots. The suffix "-legger" was briefly popular in word formation regarding the smuggling of any forbidden item, such as "meatlegger" during WWII food rationing or "book-legger," regarding banned books such as Joyce's Ulysses. It is hilarious to imagine some porn addict, desirous of smut, getting hold of a smuggled copy of Ulysses and eagerly reading it, and saying "what the fuck is this." 

Most normal people are normal in regard to whatever the abnormal is because they just don't care very much. A person normal with regard to alcohol can take it or leave it. If it gets banned and if there are criminal penalties, a normal person thinks, well, it's not so great anyway, who cares? I'll just stop. Or maybe porn doesn't move them. Or they don't have that great a time on weed, or they don't really like sweets, or what have you. So, by default, all prohibitory laws are attempts at dealing with abnormal behavior, and the irony of course is that the abnormal will find a way to engage in that behavior, even under the most severe threat of sanction. 

I guess there are people on the fence, who, if something is not prohibited and is freely available, will indulge almost as if they are addicted, but, if that substance or behavior is then prohibited by law, will moderate or stop altogether. I suppose this is why prohibitory legislation does seem to have a mitigating effect on highly destructive behavior, such as drunk driving or gun violence. Often, the mitigating effect is significant enough to make the legislation a good idea. I think probably this is in areas where consciousness gets raised, people realize they are being anti-social and that their behavior has consequences, and they moderate or stop. Reduction in gun violence via strict legal measures may remind many normal people that they really don't care about guns all that much, and when the guns are removed from their situation, they have no option for gun violence, so the rates go down. I don't care about guns at all. I never wanted one around. I have fired many different types and they are kind of cool, but who cares? That's my attitude. So I don't have a gun around. So at certain moments of my life when maybe I would have thought to use one, I didn't even have one, and so gun violence was prevented. I think in particular about suicide. Research shows that gun inflicted suicide is the most impulsive, the most frequently linked to intoxication, and the least apparent beforehand. For obvious reasons, it's also one of the most fatal. So, if a person is normal with regard to guns and doesn't really care about them one way or the other, they won't commit that kind of suicide. And the research indeed shows not only a reduction in gun inflicted suicide but also a reduction in suicide rates overall when strict gun laws are enacted. 

Addicts and alcoholics absolutely do not give a shit. You might as well make stupidity illegal, for all the effect it would have on our species. The most humane prohibitory laws around addictive substances or behaviors would allow active addicts to continue legally in their behavior. Because that behavior is going to continue utterly without regard to legality or social sanction anyway. Harm reduction would have to focus more on actually reducing harm, rather than trying to force people who cannot stop behaving harmfully to stop, or throwing them in prison. Much like some of the 17 year old students I used to teach in mathematics who were failing, hated math and just couldn't get it, it's too late. There's no way, in 180 days of school, that 12 years of shitty math education and confused neural pathways can get sorted, especially not in a 17 year old mind. It's too late. This is why I used to pass a lot of students who technically were failing. Why should I be the one to punish them for the previous 12 years of shit education to which they were subjected? As far as I was concerned, they had a Get out of Math Free card. The same would work best for criminal justice regarding alcoholism and addiction. "Here, here's your alcoholic's license. Kill yourself or get sober, we don't care."

All of these reflections go to the larger realities. Does hatchetation ever work? If so, why? Under what circumstances is it effective for us to embark on our journey of outrage with our wagon full of rocks and our little hatchet? And in what contexts is it not only futile, but also dangerous and insane? 

Floored

I bought a Groupon for a massage a couple months ago and the therapist was so busy she couldn't schedule me until yesterday. I failed to read the fine print on her services, and when I arrived she told me she does structural integration. Basically, rolfing, about which I am deeply skeptical. She explained that it wasn't really massage so much as deep connective tissue work to resolve musculoskeletal imbalances. All I heard pretty much was blah blah New Age bullshit, blah blah. 

However, as she was explaining her work to me, she said, "You chew on the left side, and you're a side sleeper, mostly left side, and you lean to the left when you sit, so most of your lower back and hip pain is on the right side. You prefer spicy food. When you run, you pronate with your right foot and have knee pain only in your right knee." 

It was like sitting across from the Sherlock Holmes of body work. So I figured even if the method itself has no scientific basis and might be a giant load of hooey, at least she seemed to know what she was doing. 

The Groupon was for 90 minutes, but she said, "You'll only be able to handle half of that this time, because I can tell you're a mess, so we'll just schedule another appointment. And I'm going to give you a list of things you need to change." A lot of my defenses went up at that point also. I can handle anything, you can't hurt me, I'm not a fucking mess and I ain't changing a goddamned thing. 

But I have been frustrated by certain misalignment issues, sleep issues and difficulty stretching into certain areas, so I figured I'd give it a try. It was strange, because it did hurt, but not in a bad way. It hurt in a way that is hard to describe. Definitely not pleasurable. I guess the closest I can come to describing it is that it felt true. Proportional to the pain I myself was storing in my muscles. I could tell she was getting deeply into some areas where I had a tremendous amount of stored tension, where I was holding a lot in my muscles. In particular, she manipulated the whole suite of muscles around the pelvic girdle: thigh adductors, iliotibial band, hamstrings, glutes. Basically, the down low. Very powerful. 

The main thing I noticed when she was done was that most of the pain was gone from my pelvic region. I had been too shy or protected or something to tell her that I've had pelvic and prostate pain, which is silly but typical of me, so I researched why it would be that "structural integration" would relieve that pain when I got home and started learning all about the pelvic floor muscles. 

I knew absolutely nothing about these muscles before yesterday, except where they are and what they are called, since I teach human anatomy. I also vaguely knew that they are often considered of clinical significance for women, and that Kegel exercises specifically target the tone and strength of these muscles. But as I started researching more, I discovered a whole physical therapy and "alternative medicine" thing involving the pelvic floor muscles and chronic pelvic pain syndrome in men. Most of this work is being done in other countries, for some reason. 

The main recommendation for working with the pelvic floor muscles around pelvic pain is to learn toning and strengthening exercises as well as relaxation techniques to release these muscles. The theory is that chronic pelvic pain in men is not a problem with the prostate, usually, (of course, after bacterial prostatitis and cancer have been ruled out), but with tight, hypercontracted pelvic floor muscles, and prostate and other pain in the region is referred pain.  

So I figured I would try the main relaxation technique, which is to lie on the floor and do deep, diaphragmatic breathing for at least ten minutes, and imagine the pelvic floor muscles "melting." I could use general relaxation practice anyway, as I am the type of person who tenses up while meditating because I am afraid I'm doing it wrong. I sometimes find myself yelling at myself, "would you fucking RELAX!" I carry a lot of tension. One of the huge benefits of exercise has been the way it burns off a lot of that constant clenching of all of my muscles. One of the huge gaps in recovery literature and the labors of recovery is the body-- and an enduring part of what keeps me sober has been re-entering my body, so to speak, and slowly, painfully, getting it to trust me again. 

I started the deep breathing practice and slowly began to relax. As I began to try to release the pelvic floor muscles, I couldn't even feel them. It's weird that we have muscle groups with which we are so out of touch we don't even sense them when we turn our attention to that area. But I kept with the practice anyway, figuring it couldn't hurt. 

Suddenly, on one of the deep breaths, the whole region absolutely released and did in fact feel like it was melting. At the same time, an enormous dark wave of graveyard grief, sorrow, loneliness and deeply forlorn sadness rose and opened up my chest. This was such a surprise that I immediately felt the muscle group tighten again. Now I am much more in touch with both feelings, the completely relaxed opening and the fearful and controlling tightening. So weird and unexpected. 

Metaphors that present themselves are that it was like visiting an ancient place that had fallen into ruin from neglect. Or it was like finally turning my attention to an extremely lonely person who has just been waiting for years to be seen and heard. Or it was like confronting some kind of deeply buried shame that absolutely centered around control and not being embarrassed, like, stretching all the way back to potty training. And there was a powerful cascade of all sorts of darker emotions around all of that. 

So I kept at it for the full ten minutes, which seemed like a long, long time. The only sentence that presented itself was "I've been so unhappy." 

Huh. Shut the fuck up. No I haven't, I've been fine. That's life. Get over it. Nobody ever gets what they want and that is beautiful, say They Might Be Giants. No, I'm not unhappy. No. And with that resistance mentally came the unfamiliar but all too familiar sensation of the tightening and armoring of that muscle group. In the relaxation phases, up welled that simple and plain fact and its attendant feelings of dark grief. 

I've been unhappy. 

I am unhappy. 

I've been unhappy for many years, bottom line. Instantly the defense or dismissal kicks in. You've had stretches of happiness! Stop complaining. What the fuck do you expect from life anyway? It's just self pity. I'll give you something to cry about. Get over it, everyone is unhappy. You think you deserve better than everyone?

Okay, but. I am unhappy. 

I don't want to be unhappy anymore. 

Then, instantly, the strategic voices kick in. Well, what are you going to do about it? It's your fault. Fix it. Stop bitching and get busy. If you had made better choices. If you were less self-centered. 

Okay, but I am unhappy right now. 

And that's that. And it feels amazing to just accept it and quiet the voices that would either deny or mock my unhappiness. It's good to keep it simple for now and live in the gentle acknowledgement that I am unhappy and that I would like to be happy. For one thing, it helps clarify all of the weird permutations, contortions and desperate behavior in which I engage, in an effort to run away from the simple fact that I am unhappy. It's right down to whether or not to have dessert, for example. I have been increasingly aware of how I use sugar to avoid feeling sad, and how sad and deprived I feel if I abstain from sweets. That seems odd to me-- I mean, damn, it's just fro yo right? No, no it isn't. It's also self medication. 

Exactly how this was all tangled up in the pelvic floor muscles is beyond me at this point. 

After the practice, much of the pain was alleviated, at least until I started the habitual re-formation of the armor. It's promising, however, on two levels. One is that maybe a way of at least managing the chronic pain I've been experiencing is to practice both pelvic floor muscle exercises and relaxation, even if there is some clinically indicated prostate issue or whatever. It felt that way yesterday. I tend to think I can manage chronic pain in a lot of ways without changing my life. But sometimes the message from the body is like Rilke: You must change your life. The other is that maybe work with this muscle group will continue to unearth stored sadness, which in turn might offer yet more freedom and clarity, going forward. 

I used to be skeptical of the Ericsonian idea that we "store trauma" in our musculature, until, years ago, I had a shiatsu session with an expert body worker in Santa Fe. It was a turning point experience for me, and many strange and unexpected things happened during that hour. Huge waves of heat escaped from my body, for one thing, so that I was drenched in sweat. Certain pressure points opened channels of intense anger. Others of intense grief and loss. Others of fear. The other such experience I had was during an acupuncture session, also in Santa Fe. The therapist and I were working on releasing tension in my abdominal region. She put needles into a vertical line of points along my skin above the linea alba, and I melted into one of the deepest experiences of sadness and grief I'd ever had, followed by astonishingly indomitable and blind rage. The region of my body did in fact seem to "hold" or "contain" a particular set of humiliating and traumatic memories I had suppressed for a long time. 

Around that same time in my life, I started to read Alice Miller. It was good to encounter all of this, but it also was too much for me at the time, and I put it aside. But obviously I'm in another phase of going deep. 

No trip through Hades is complete without a direct encounter with decades of stored misery. I tell myself.  

Get a massage, they said. It's relaxing, they said. 

Bro, I literally cannot even rn