John Muir

"As long as I live I'll hear the birds and the winds and the waterfalls sing.  I'll interpret the rocks and learn the language of flood and storm and avalanche.  I'll make the acquaintance of the wild gardens and the glaciers and get as near to the heart of this world as I could.  And so I did.  I sauntered about from rock to rock, from grove to grove, from stream to stream, and whenever I met a new plant I would sit down beside it for a minute or a day, to make its acquaintance, hear what it had to tell.  I asked the boulders where they had been and whither they were going, and when night found me, there I camped.  I took no more heed to save time or to make haste than did the trees or the stars.  This is true freedom, a good, practical sort of immortality."  John Muir

Margaret Sanger

1879 - 1966

A Simile - Recovering People and Atheists

Atheists are very much like recovering addicts and/or alcoholics.  Should they relapse into faith they will have forfeited the claim to which they rightfully make, and that is this:  People of faith rely upon their prayers to invisible and inaudible gods in order to make themselves feel better; to get outside of themselves in times of great pain.  This is the precise reason that addicts and alcoholics rely upon drugs and alcohol.  But when the addict sobers up he must accept our world as it is.  Same for the aspiring Atheist.  Both must accept themselves and consciousness "as is" unless of course they can muster the courage to revolutionize things, both internally and to some extent externally.

Then there are those pesky people who drink socially but who never become addicted.  Isn't that the primary path that religious folk take; getting just enough religion to suit their respective agendas without going nuts over it in the process.  Oh, sure, they believe, but it's not the cornerstone of their existences, which has always been money.  Just enough whiskey in the tumbler at the end of the day to slightly modify a rough day at the office.

The Atheist lives an existential and exceedingly difficult life in many respects.  I know, it's just easier if you have faith and move on.  It's easier to keep drinking, too.  I respond to both:  "but at what cost"?  The faithful first lose their intellect.  The intellect of the addict/alcoholic stays preserved for a time.  I support this by referring generally to the myriad authors who could not control their consumption, which led to a collapse of their physical and emotional health, yet produced brilliant works.  That gift of being able to to process and analyze information thus lingers - for a time.

In the end it really doesn't matter.  Eventually they all fall down.  The faithful never realize it.  Alcoholics eventually do if their livers don't fail them first.

Non-Fiction in Second Person

You walked out of your house and immediately noticed the cool autumn heaviness in the air that had been left behind by two days of steady rain.  You invited your wife to join you, and you commented on how nice and clean things seemed to be and how the air was thick and cool.  She agreed.  You decided right there and then that you'd take your daily prescribed jaunt around the track at the park in order to jump-start your endorphines.  Your goal - three miles. 

You arrived and immediately noticed that there were no other cars present in the parking lot that adjoins the track and park.  How odd,  you thought, that there would be nobody here especially given the pleasant early fall weather and the fact that you all had been prohibited from accessing the track for two consecutive days on account of the foul weather.  Now that's not entirely true.  You took you wife and your little dog on a one-half mile walk in the mist yesterday, but that was most certainly the exception because you saw no one there.  But this day was different.  In fact, batches of pale blue patches of sky littered the departing clouds and a cool dry air had introduced itself to the region just hours ago.  The grass was almost dry, as was the asphalt tracktop.

You got out of your car and hid the key on top of the right rear tire.  It was cool but you wore a loose t-shirt so you could gradually earn your warmth as you walked.  You'd later find that the warmth was plentiful on lap four of ten.

One two three one, one two three one, . . . This is how you kept track of your laps.  Occasionally you'd picture the appropriate number hovering over the Clinch mountains to the north of the track.  But including the number within the cadence of your power-walk worked better.  A problem was always presented when you reached lap numbered seven.  This two syllabled trouble maker did not fit easily into the otherwise perfect cadence like its single syllable brother and sister integers did.  So seven was oftentimes mounted high in the sky over the Clinch mountain range until the lap was completed, at which time you would return to your preferred style of lap counting; eight two three four eight two three four . . ..

Coincidentally, you were completing lap seven, the huge number fading into the clouds above Appalachia, when you saw you had company.  It's the lady who drives the new Honda Civic who runs her mouth about church to anyone foolish enough to join her as she sauntered around the track.  Odd, you thought, how she's leaning slightly to the left and walking so slowly.  To ensure that your hunch was correct you turned as you walked, one two three eight, one two three eight, . . and noticed that there were no additional cars in the parking lot. 

You didn't want to acknowledge to yourself how the woman just seemed to materialize on the west side of the walking track.  You, the child of absurd and antagonist right side logic, would solve this mystery and never miss a beat in so doing.

As you continued on you looked down at the parking lot behind that doctors' office and saw that it, too, was empty.  Oftentimes eager walkers will park in that lot and walk up a gravel access to the track for reasons you don't understand.  Convenience, in all likelihood drives them to trespass.  You concede that it is a steep drive up the hill to the park, especially with a stick shift, which you have, if I'm remembering correctly.

You walked on and so did she, however at a much slower pace.  Indeed you would eventually approach her.

A while back you developed some track etiquette which you've stuck by I have to admit.  When approaching another walker you remove your sunglasses, put them on your head, look them in the eye with a feigned smile and utter, "evenin'", or "mornin'" and walk on in order to defray any awkwardness.  Everyone had always been receptive to the quick platitude and this old lady would be no exception.

As you approached her you saw that she was most certainly not the tall church lady who drives the Honda, et cetera, et cetera.  Her hair was gray and pulled in either direction and tied into braided pig tales.  Very unusual.  She was wearing a sweatshirt, non-descript pants (trousers, really), and carried a large purse over her left shoulder, which probably accounted to the leaning I had noticed earlier.

Finally you were parallel to her as you uttered, as always, your greeting - "evenin' ma'am."  As you said this you immediately saw that she was a Native American.  Her skin was dark brownish red, her cheekbones jutted out prominently, and her eyes bore a wild glance when she very quietly returned my remark.  She had no teeth.   You had seen that half glance before, but you couldn't place the temporal proximity.

You walked ahead and was suddenly struck with a desire to say to her, "I'm sorry."  You decided right away, in fact, that when you encountered her on lap nine I you'd do precisely that.  And you knew that she'd understand, which caused chills to run over your spine and sweating head.

You rounded the starting point as you uttered your last "one, two, three, eight" and began again with "one, two three nine."  You rounded the second corner of the track and immediately looked back for several reasons;  to see her again, to judge how long it would roughly take to meet up with her, and to ensure that she wasn't leaving through the parking area."  That kind of thing. 

You turned.  She was gone.

Just like that.

Movie Review: The Master

I made a special trip to Knoxville to see The Master on the wide screen.  There's no substitute.  I saw One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest in the theatre when I was about ten years old from whence came my appreciation.  However, I rarely go to the movies anymore because most of what plays is pop culture shit that offends my visual and auditory senses.

So I heard that one of my favorite directors, Paul Thomas Anderson [Boogy Nights, There Will Be Blood] had filmed a screenplay he wrote that loosly followed L. Ron Hubbard's (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) life juxtaposed with the existence of a trampled human being, played by Jacquin Phoenix.  The film follows the two and Hoffman's pack of brainwashed congregants around the western hemisphere.  It's the interplay between the characters that amazed me so.  On the downside, the film had no object.  For example, in There Will Be Blood (best film I've ever seen with the worst title I've ever read), the object for Daniel Plainview was to make enough money to seclude himself from humanity, which he hated both individually and in the aggregate.  And the object was achieved.  The movie flowed nicely along his ambitious journey into his Biltmore-esque mansion where it ended beautifully, with the line "I'm finished!"

Although The Master clawed its way into territory I've never before witnessed on film, it simply cannot be said to be better than There Will Be Blood.  I say this because Rolling Stone magazine stated that Master was perhaps the best film of the decade.  I don't think that There Will Be Blood is ten years old, so the statement cannot bear this weight.  However, assuming the classic is older than that, then Master has a chance because it is indeed a great work of art.   At the same time, this statement speaks sadly about the state of American film industry; i.e., this film should easily be topped, but it's not.

B+

Bill Evans

I discovered Bill Evans like Columbus discovered America.

http://youtu.be/adPpG0Dnxeg

http://youtu.be/HPiZoND209U

Hubble

Plural Blue in Third Person

Once he was diagnosed he understood the arc of his existence for the first time in his his life.  With the benefit of hindsight he coupled the diagnosis with his character according to the law of dialectical materialism.  He, too, attached the myriad situational facts, or at least the ones implanted so violently into his memory, to the algorithm.  The die was cast. The result?  Understanding.  Alas he understood his station in life and even why he bemoaned it so, especially now that he was deeply within the middle age of his life.  Aside from deleting hundreds of question marks from his chronicle, he also realized that with understanding comes wisdom -- a place he'd dropped anchor.  Realizing this, he automatically faded back to that familiar plural blue, but only for a Pavlovian moment.  This new knowledge and wisdom increased his longevity, but unfortunately that increased his suffering, too.  Ecclesiastes nailed it when he, the Preacher, declared that great sorrow and vexation of spirit shadows great wisdom and knowledge.  Indeed, Preacher.

My Barns



I suppose there are folks who've never entered the hallway of a barn.  Never inhaled wafts of cut hay and fecundity.  I have, though.  And although my barns have for the most part suffered defeat by pounding wind, rain, and hoof, they are static in the eye of my mind.

My first barn aligned the back property of my grandparents small mountain farm in Morgan county.  It was rectangular and long with stalls and rooms for hay and implements.  My most vivid memory was my boyhood amble from the house through the cornfield to the barn when I encountered Billy Joe's Doberman, Lady, with her new pups in one of the stalls.  She greeted me with a display of white fangs separated by smaller pickets and a gurgling growl that terrified me stone cold.  That barn was never painted.  It just sat there until one day I noticed that it had disappeared as though it had never existed.  It's queer how the mind forgets matter shortly after that matter is removed from sight.  Forgetting must follow.

My second barn still stands.  It is red though I don't know if it was always painted red.  It housed furniture that was eventually sold through a salvage store that stood just in front of the structure on main highway. When I was younger I got a hand job in the loft there between the vertical box springs and mattresses.  I also smoked a lot of weed and imbibed in a line or two of the deadly South American export that exists as the result of man's chemical exploitation of the tropical flora that abounds there, and the American appetite for more.  I don't go back to that barn anymore.  I haven't been there for a very long time.  It's better that way.  For me.

My second barn was black.  It sat atop a flat farm in Chickamauga, Georgia.  My buddy's father had bought the farm and sweated to rehabilitate it, including the great barn, which was traditionally two-storied and tall with a half hexagon tin roof that spilled down from way above to the flat slanted roofs on either side.  I wrestled a bull calf there for the amusement and impression of the others.  Her name was Sadie.  Everyone else was afraid of her.  But I, who had much, much more to prove, would face off with ol' Sadie and grab her neck and hang on for dear life until I could persuade her to land on her side in the shit and mud, at which time I announced that I won yet another match with the feared bull, who was more like an aspiring adolescent like me with much more to learn about this life and its people.  For example, I would learn that wrestling a bull calf from its feet would be among the least complex tasks that would await my complicated life, which was unfolding before me like some larval curiosity.  This was my second barn.  I was thirteen.

My third barn was red.  Classic.  It had a loft with two levels.  Below the stalls were aligned on either side of the hallway.  It was the first, but fortunately not the last barn in which I would, years and years hence,  make love amid seed and the floating aroma of tamed animals while "spilling seeds in the hay great barn.".  I put her down and loved her in the loft.  Just like that.  She had just returned from a beach trip with her family.  Naked, her tan lines sent me into sexual orbit.  Her breasts, her lower pelvis, and her museum quality behind, all white and thus accentuated for me as if to say, "focus all of your attention here, young man, these are the elements of the woman that you will forever separate from her true identity, and you will have become ordinary and callous on account of your narrow lens."  Later, I bush-hogged over a bumble bee nest once beside the structure and ran stung to the barn.  On another occasion I took shelter when lightning struck nearby and sent a jolt through my body in the driving rain as I steered the Ford 4000 away beneath gray and electric cloudbanks.  The more I consider this particular barn, the nearer I get to who I might have been during its era.  I see a vague sillouette of the youth standing in the hallway, but I can't make him out.  To this day, I cannot make him out.
 
A barn that had been built decades earlier stood only yards from the Wolftever Creek.  I remember that the barn was isolated in a woodsy pixel of Hamilton county, Tennessee, near an unincorporated hamlet called Ooltewah, which means in Native American, "cry of the owl."  In hindsight I now realize that I did a bad thing there.  I grabbed a beautiful milk snake and pulled it from the hole in the floorboards it had eyed for its escape, and withdrew the long serpent and threw it in the firepit and watched it burn and draw up into an agony that I cannot envision.  I did this to impress upon the men for whom I worked.  I needed that then.  Fear not, young man, lest you appear weak and frail and undeserving of the company of real men.  I will answer for what I did.  I am sorry for what I did.  But that is insufficient.

I remember the two barns in Morristown where I fucked, made love, whatever it's called.  I got caught in the act by a farmer in one barn.  He kindly turned away and allowed us to try, as best we could, to pull our clothes on and fix our hair as if this was going to kindle any notion at all in the farmer that we may have been reading to each other - perhaps the bible.  He returned, walking gently upon that pixel of earth that his family had probably owned for generations.  And as if to remind us that his eyesight had not failed him he looked at us both and acknowledged that we were "making a little love" on his property and that it was okay."  I didn't get caught in the second Morristown barn but I recall insisting upon a fast one (quickie in moron parlance) because I then had a history, albeit singular, of getting caught fucking in a barn.
 
My very own barn has been dismantled and held for naught.  There is nothing left save a single piece of rock that lies flush with the earth upon which one of the load bearing supports once stepped.  I installed a sign above the first level of the simple, square two-level structure that I picked up at some antique store that read "Butternut Crackers are Extra Good!'  Red with white letters and an exclamation point.  Simple.  Simpler times.  There I loved again.  Loftsex.  From time to time I look up about 12 feet to a swath of empty space and imagine how odd it now is to think that I loved her in that space.  Now, beneath it, I still do.

And finally, there is that unvanquished barn in White Pine where Cupcake was stored in a stable.  She was a walking horse that I purchased for my daughter, Emily.  In our opinion she walked just fine and needed no further instruction.  We had no intention of training or frightening her into stepping high in the air in some morbid horsedance.  We just wanted to love her and ride her from time to time. And we did.  All of us.  We'd withdraw Cupcake from her stall and fit her with all the accouterments.  I created a special harness that did not involve the insertion of a horizontal steel bar behind her teeth that would be jerked to and fro for god knows how long.  The barn was ordinary and I have to admit that by the time I purchased Cupcake for my daughter, the horse was too. It was too late to draw draw out its identity.  It had become chattel.  Property.  A thing.  Now years on Cupcake reminds of an untitled poem by Tom Pollack, which I call The Tiger, that saddens me every time I read it:

I saw through the bars
That defined his small world
A great tiger
Asleep in the sun
Near a small tropical tree
Planted and carefully maintained
By the Caretakers.
Nearby was a large vessel
Which was always filled
With fresh water
And a platter
Which was periodically supplied
With raw meat.
I felt sorry for the poor beast
And imagined that he was dreaming
Of a time long ago
And a place far away;
However, after a time
He stirred
And looked at me
And I could tell at once
That the Big Cat
Had not dreamed
For a long time.

                               T.J. (Tom) Pollack, from his rare book, entitled Zingers

One day I traveled to White Pine, released Cupcake from her stall, and fitted her with her saddle and gear.  I rode into the field of the adjacent landowner and returned.  Beside the barn there was a stand of hardwoods with a path snaking between them.  I took the path and rode her between woods until I neared the barn.  There she jerked of her own volition toward the structure even though I was not at all ready to end our time together.  When Cupcake veered right, I slid left and fell to the hard ground on my left side crushing my ribs.  Why did she desire confinement.  Was Tom's Tiger like that, too.  Do animals become institutionalized?  Are barn the institutions.  The prisons.

So, in any event, these are hallways of the hallmark barns of my life.  The working farm with the barn as its proud centerpiece is all but gone and given way to corporate operations and the conversion of the family farm into subdivided and restricted lots.

But I take some solace in the lingering fact that although many of these structures are weathered, missing their wooden teeth, and leaning obscenely out of square, they will probably still be around when I'm dead and gone.  It reminds me of how little time I have remaining.  I must get busy filling my loft with as much joy as I can fit into my ever-expanding consciousness.

Real Salvation

When there's a problem with our circuitry we have to evaluate our performance where others simply move on through without even recognizing that they've changed the world in some respect.  I rose early.  That's good.  But I went back to bed.  That's not good.  I said "that's not good" instead of saying "that's bad."  That's good.  That kind of thing.  A problem in our circuitry compels us to lose the weight we'd otherwise carry around with us.  It causes us to become more positive in general terms.  A sudden wave at the neighbor where a scowl would otherwise have been delivered.  A new vernacular develops with our spouse.  Instead of berating everyone else for being so fucking backward, I simply inquire:  "How'd I do today?"  And I listen hard for her response.  I'll either be rewarded and made cognizant of my progress, or be painfully made aware of the fact that I've strayed from my path of real salvation.  "Real Salvation" is daunting.  It requires me to act where no action is brewing, or to refrain from acting when all my internal matter is aligned and prepared to jut out through my arms, legs, and especially my venomous mouth.  "Real Salvation" means that if my medication makes me itch I must not mindlessly scratch the itch.  These go away.  But what is most important is that I must not portend the itches that lie ahead of me.  I must stay in this moment.  Nor may I stray off into the past, playing blame the game, or blaming the Random Number Generator, or blaming God.  Or blaming the absence of God.  Concentrate on the immediate, and I will be well.  I trust that these things at least border on Real Salvation.  I trust that they are true because I must embrace the truth in order to stay buoyant in these troubled times.  

Major League Ballet

Orlando Hernandez, a.k.a. "El Duque" 

Tim Lincecum, a.k.a. "The Freak"

International Workers' Day

Today is May Day, also known as International Workers' Day.  Celebrate labor.  Celebrate workers' rights.  Celebrate international efforts to create safe working conditions, living wages, and solidarity among the rank and file.  Reinvigorate the Occupy movement so that Americans will never, ever forget how the gamblers on Wall Street gambled with our economy and came up craps, and shrugged, like their anthropomorphic icon, Atlas.  So, celebrate the hybrid socialist programs that saved our automobile and finance industries.  Celebrate Barack Obama, a champion of labor despite the grueling adversity he faces from the right wing of Congress.  Celebrate American workers.  Celebrate those who produce and do not take.  Embrace this elegant statement:  "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."  Karl Marx

Dialectical and Historical Materialism 101

Hegel argued that the human cognitive process was the producer or artisan of the material world.  The approach was egocentric, to say the least.  Marx, however, reversed the process with his musing on dialectical materialism, or as Stalin coined the term, "diamat."  In other words, our cognitive ability is merely a reflection of the ever changing process that lies outside of our cognition.  It is not we who author the material world.  It authors us.  Class struggle then becomes the targeted recipient of Marx' critique of the matter of the world and his vision of the way things ought to be.  Our life is controlled by matter.  Human history is the history of matter and its dominion by humans.  This is historical materialism.  Proof 1:  I am made of the same cabon matter as the keyboard at which I peck away.

The Book I Never Wrote

In the Appalachian region that is defined, not by grant writers or statisticians, but by topography, the vertical becomes the rule, with horizontal the tempering exception.  The rises and falls in the Appalachian nation follow the rise and fall and rise of its denizens.

My mommy let me dip my head into the icy mountain water when I was a baby boy and it has kept me nearby.  The smell of dying apples on the ground.  The smell of coal smoke.  My grandmother's intoxicating wafts from the frock folds of her plain and sleeveless house dresses that revealed the black hairs she did not shave beneath her arms on goddamn purpose.  Pork meat.  Creasy Greens from the Emory Riverbed.  Highway 27.  The Cord House.  Coal trucks.  Hollers.  Deep ones.  Mountain Laurel.  That odd sensation that rose when we passed the garage and junk yard just south of town.  My Daddy.  The word, "PENITENTIARY" that I learned so early on.  Shotguns and pistols and more cash money that I have ever seen.  Secrets.  There were secrets in every closet and beneath every made bed.  We mined the hollers to find that dead baby in an empty dynamite box.  These were the tickets torn in two -- I was illegally admitted to an NC-17 cinematic masterpiece that still haunts my many musings.

So now, post modern, post mumblecore, I spend the nanoseconds and half hours reflecting upon "the way things came to be this way."  I now conclude that I cannot ignore the hollers and the shotgun blasts of my youth.  The thrill of the fall.  Clouds came down and misted up the mysterious people who hung tight to the bluffsteep sides of tectonic rises.  I did not then know that I was deep inside the belly of Appalachia.

I would eventually dare to open my eyes under the icy water and look to the rounded creekstones for some meaning.  I would eventually realize that I, too, was in a state of constant change, constant flow.  From whence came the icy water.  I would learn to question the etiology of the flow.  The mountains.  Wiley Arms mountain in particular was my focus.  I remember climbing to a point near the top and being chased away by a large dog with a chain looped around its neck.  What was it guarding?

Michael Paul Smith - My Paternal Half Brother, Singing I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, by Hank Williams

My half-brother, Michael Paul Smith, singing, I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, by Hank Williams.

Hear that lonesome whippoorwill,
He sounds too blue to fly.
The midnight train is whining low,
I'm so lonesome I could cry.
I've never seen a night so long
When time goes crawling by.
The moon just went behind a cloud
To hide its face and cry.

Did you ever see a robin weep,
When leaves began to die?
That means he's lost the will to live,
I'm so lonesome I could cry.

The silence of a falling star
Lights up a purple sky.
And as I wonder where you are
I'm so lonesome I could cry.

http://www.bandmix.com/michael-p-smith/