Goodbye Tulsa

Eve of Departure XXXV

Looking ahead to next year, where a move is inevitable. Just made it official, moving to west Eugene during the new year and end of the decade. 2010 will be pretty monumental, year 4 of the five year plan.

This year was pretty awesome…dominated by crazy but exotic lovers, good friends, crazy incidents involving angry Indian men (casinos not slurpees) chasing me with rusty shovels…..

got my degree did a great deal of traveling…found a job that I love….got a couple of books published…had lots of good sex…and had a lot of laughs…..so how do I top that?????

Goals for 2010:
Take up Guitar
Tai Chi classes
write a treatment for an animated short
Get my teaching certificate
CPR certification
Write and record a comedy album
start a country band
take boxing lessons
edit old short stories and send them off for publication
publish my latest book of poems, “Toss offs and Throwaways”
Write and complete another book of poetry, tentatively titled “Blooming, Bursting and Burning”
eat better
remove corn, wheat, and soy from diet.

Easy Access

If there weren’t any
reservations
about who could
obtain reservations
then vacancy
wouldn’t be the issue.

Anyone could
physically be there
but sometimes
one can feel
lonelier
with others
than they
would by themselves.

Finding
someone isn’t
the issue,
its finding
someone
who deserves
the access,
smells
taste
and touch
of such a forgotten
and rare delicacy.

Easy access
isn’t altogether
easy.

Edward Austin Robertson

Exit Velocity

So it is time to make a decision. No more hemming and hawing.

Just make a decision and be man enough to stand behind it.

Ok. Eugene it will be. Why Eugene, you ask?

Because that is the biggest challenge. Because it is the craziest of the options, because it makes no sense.

The same people who will be questioning this will be the same people who said ” Why the fuck Tulsa, Ok?”

It’s crazy but when haven’t I not done the crazy stuff huh?

Exactly. As crazy as it was to move down here on a whim, it was the best decision I could’ve made.

I’ve gotten to the point where I hardly question myself. I know myself well enough at this point to just follow through and plow ahead, knowing that whatever I decide is the best decision.

Regarding moving, I’ve been thinking about it too much, and not feeling it. My head has been saying, Dallas, Oakland, Portland, and Austin.

But my heart says Eugene. It felt the best of all the west coast cities I visited this fall.
Doesn’t necessarily make sense, considering the many connections I have in other cities, and the few connections (almost nil) I have in Eugene.

but I’ve got to do what’s best for my writing career.

The thought of going onstage and doing stand up frightens me more than I want to admit. Just time to step away for a while. Just one more first draft and I’ll be free to really kick it.

Edit Edit Edit. a reading here and there, Tai chi and guitar chords on a used Gibson acoustic.

Why not? Portland is still only a couple of hours away. Okay. Time to get it on then. Tie up the loose ends and develop and exit strategy. Save save save til Boxing Day, and then on with it.

If there is something scaring you, then maybe there is reason to embrace it and see why. Embrace yourself, keep testing yerself as Emilio Estevez says to Lou Diamond Phillips on “Young Guns’, right before the peyote trip.

Bravery isn’t lacking fear, its going on in spite of it.

Toy on Target

1.
Dropping
toys
instead of bombs
for the Festival of Children

that
said the market researchers
will doubtlessly make
an impression

It has made
a great
impression
on the whole world

2.
If the aeroplane
had dropped the toys
a fortnight ago
and only now the bombs

my two children
thanks to your kindess
would have had something to play
with for those two weeks

~Erich Fried~

Money

One of my favorite Carver poems, pictured here with Tess Gallagher

In order to be able to live
on the right side of the law.
To always use his own name
and phone number. To go bail
for a friend and not give
a damn if the friend skips town.
Hope, in fact, she does.
To give some money
to his mother. And to his
children and their mother.
Not save it. He wants
to use it up before it’s gone.
Buy clothes with it.
Pay the rent and utilities.
Buy food, and then some.
Go out for dinner when he feels like it.
And it’s okay
to order anything off the menu!
Buy drugs when he wants.
Buy a car. If it breaks
down, repair it. Or else
buy another. See that
boat? He might buy one
just like it. And sail it
around the Horn, looking
for company. He knows a
girl in Porto Alegre who’d love
to see him in
his own boat,sails full,
turn into the harbor for her.
A fellow who could afford
to come all this way
to see her. Just because
he liked the sound
of her laughter,
and the way she swings her hair.

~Raymond Carver~

Middle of the Road

“Traveling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride, but I saw more interesting people there.”
–Neil Young, in the Decade liner notes

New Book

Instant Exchange of Recognition finally on sale at LULu.com

Its actually more of a bargain than S& M. $13.30 in American dollars..

check it out.

Mick

Ginsberg

Hadda Been Playing On The Jukebox
Written by Allen Ginsberg, performed by Rage Against the Machine
It had to be flashin’ like the daily double
It had to be playin’ on TV
It had to be loud mouthed on the comedy hour
It had to be announced over loud speakers

The CIA and the Mafia are in cahoots

It had to be said in old ladies’ language
It had to be said in American headlines
Kennedy stretched and smiled and got double crossed by lowlife goons and agents
Rich bankers with criminal connections
Dope pushers in CIA working with dope pushers from Cuba working with a
big time syndicate from Tampa, Florida
And it had to be said with a big mouth

It had to be moaned over factory foghorns
It had to be chattered on car radio news broadcasts
It had to be screamed in the kitchen
It had to be yelled in the basement where uncles were fighting

It had to be howled on the streets by newsboys to bus conductors
It had to be foghorned into New York harbor
It had to echo onto hard hats
It had to turn up the volume in university ballrooms

It had to be written in library books, footnoted
It had to be in the headlines of the Times and Le Monde
It had to be barked on TV
It had to be heard in alleys through ballroom doors

It had to be played on wire services
It had to be bells ringing
Comedians stopped dead in the middle of a joke in Las Vegas

It had to be FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and Frank Costello syndicate
mouthpiece meeting in Central Park, New York weekends,
reported Time magazine

It had to be the Mafia and the CIA together starting war on Cuba,
Bay of Pigs and poison assassination headlines

It had to be dope cops in the Mafia
Who sold all their heroin in America

It had to be the FBI and organized crime working together
in cahoots against the commies

It had to be ringing on multinational cash registers
A world-wide laundry for organized criminal money

It had to be the CIA and the Mafia and the FBI together
They were bigger than Nixon
And they were bigger than war

It had to be a large room full of murder
It had to be a mounted ass- a solid mass of rage
A red hot pen
A scream in the back of the throat

It had to be a kid that can breathe
It had to be in Rockefellers’ mouth
It had to be central intelligence, the family, allofthis, the agency Mafia
It had to be organized crime

One big set of gangs working together in cahoots

Hitmen
Murderers everywhere

The secret
The drunk
The brutal
The dirty rich

On top of a slag heap of prisons
Industrial cancer
Plutonium smog
Garbage cities

Grandmas’ bed soft from fathers’ resentment

It had to be the rulers
They wanted law and order
And they got rich on wanting protection for the status quo

They wanted junkies
They wanted Attica
They wanted Kent State
They wanted war in Indochina

It had to be the CIA and the Mafia and the FBI

Multinational capitalists
Strong armed squads
Private detective agencies for the rich
And their armies and navies and their air force bombing planes

It had to be capitalism
The vortex of this rage
This competition
Man to man

The horses head in a capitalists’ bed
The Cuban turf
It rumbles in hitmen
And gang wars across oceans

Bombing Cambodia settled the score when Soviet pilots
manned Egyptian fighter planes

Chiles’ red democracy
Bumped off with White House pots and pans

A warning to Mediterranean governments

The secret police have been embraced for decades

The NKPD and CIA keep each other’s secrets
The OGBU and DIA never hit their own
The KGB and the FBI are one mind

Brute force and full of money
Brute force, world-wide, and full of money
Brute force, world-wide, and full of money
Brute force, world-wide, and full of money
Brute force, world-wide, and full of money

It had to be rich and it had to be powerful
They had to murder in Indonesia 500000
They had to murder in Indochina 2000000
They had to murder in Czechoslovakia
They had to murder in Chile
They had to murder in Russia

And they had to murder in America

Quite possibly the toughest man who ever lived

Dick Proenneke.

just found out about this cat. Watched a film on him at the library. Built his own fucking log cabin in the wilderness. Even the door hinges were made from a bucket…..carved his own spoons and bowls…..what tha fuck????

he left in 1968 to go up to Alaska and stayed for 30 years…..30 years no tang???? Dude was like a monk. Amazing. Simply Amazing.