The Marble Mountains

The sun-baked manzanita smelled of heavy, swirled honey along the trailside.

Looking south, the Wooley Creek Watershed resembled the rumbling, ruffled flanks of an enormous, pine-green grizzly bear.

Willy and I laid down on our backs in a field of columbine, lupine, corn lily and paintbrush and watched the hummingbirds squirt around in their frenzy of hunger, aggression and courtship.

If I lived as fully as I would like, than surely each time I look over and see my brother in our youth I should crumble to the ground in a fit of joy, open another bottle of Scotch, and toast that our lives may be spared!

That night at Burney Lake we all got stoned as a cobbled street and built pyramids of pinecones, set them on fire, and sailed them into the lake.

Annie yelled: “We made TV! We made TV!”

And I couldn’t help but think that we would all look back one day and be pleased that we had walked in the mountains when we could.

July 2007
Marble Mountains, California

A Luck With No Name

Here I am with these words again.

I can´t really think of much to say except that we´re damn lucky to be here.

Where exactly?

Well I could get specific about where I actually am, sitting on a sandy spit beside an unnamed lake in Chile, but really I just mean that we´re lucky to be anywhere at all.

Here.

I could get specific about the miracle of a life-supporting planet dangling like a thought through corkscrewing infiniti, but even that would only be a scratch on the surface.

You. Here.

We could talk at length about the miracle of your parents ever meeting. Or each of their parents for that matter. We could go on and on through the corkscrewing unlikelihood of it all, but why bother? It´s all too vast. Perfection is either all of it, or it doesn´t exist.

Luck maybe?

I don´t know. If it is luck it´s certainly not the type we humans ever talk about. It´s too big and it doesn´t involve sex or playing cards. Generally we´re not all that comfortable with the really big stuff.

We like to keep it manageable. If we always just stared off into the impossibility of it all we might just forget to do the laundry, feed the belly, punch the timecard.

But that´s all fine. There´s lots to be done on this particular freckle of the Milky Way. Lots to be done to keep our minds off of our unlikely lives, lest we begin to feel minute, even unimportant, which our evolution never would have allowed.

And if everything is perfectly how it is meant to be, which is beginning to feel more and more likely, than we can feel as lucky as we like. We can decide to look no further than:

Pretty sunset, a green bug on my arm, friends, a lake with no name, young man watching his thoughts roll in like the salty tide sitting in the Valdivian Rainforest who somehow still has a pair of dry socks on.

I must be the luckiest guy on this whole damn freckle.

March 2009
Near Cochamo Valley, Chile

"How'd I Do?"

This place seems to be whittled down to its adult teeth, and even most of them have started to go.

That whiskey wind and old tobacco sun have taken their toll throughout the years, and perhaps we don´t choose our vices after all.

The condor shit builds up in long white lines beneath the roosts, and these cliffs, which I´ve already likened to decaying teeth, seem to have the eyebrows of an old man.

And now I´m guilty of anthropomorphizing the anthropomorphism.

It seems we´re married to these lenses.

The goats grazing on the slope to the south look like a herd of pygmy polar bears, and the moon in the morning blue sky a thumbnail caught between the folds of dimensions.

Speaking of things breaking through often uncrossable barriers, the veil between this world and the next seems to be especially flimsy at the moment.

The dearest people in my life who have stepped out of their bodies into the nakedness of spirit have been visiting my dreams just about every night, especially my dad, and I have been getting hugs that I thought were lost to me forever.

I sat on the sheep so it couldn´t get away as Brett plunged a knife into its jugular and I held my hand against its heart as it went through its final beats, and suddenly life seemed little more than a fancy and drawn out vanishing act.

Perhaps I will have engraved on my tombstone:

¨How´d I do?¨

January 2009
Provincia de Neuquen, Argentina

The Whole Story

Searching for love is like walking into a field on a moonless night
and blindly throwing pitchforks at vermillion flycatchers,
when more than likely one was sitting on your shoulder the entire time.

Love is when you notice the darling thing,
and grow very fond of it.

Heartbreak is that one day when your rubied sweetheart turns to you,
shoots you in the throat with a nail gun,
and then flies away,
leaving you with crumpled shoulders,
in that dark field,
surrounded by pitchforks.

May 2007
Kaibab Plateau, NW Arizona

This Page Could Have Been Left Blank

It would have been much easier to not write anything at all.

Really I should be job hunting. Absurd how we feed ourselves now that we have all gone digital.

Resume’ as my quill, bullshit my arrows, the classified section is the rippling flesh of my fleeing prey.

This page could have been left blank, you know.

Probably should have been, because aren’t I supposed to be looking for love? Don’t I mind night after night of sleeping alone?

And what do the others guys tell me? That I should be adding notches to my belt every chance I get?

Should have left it blank.

There are so many errands I could be running right now. Or grad programs to apply for. And what is my purpose here, anyway? Damn I really need to get that smog check.

If I just had the sense to leave this page blank I never would have had to leave that busy city to come and sit on this beach.

I never would have had to watch that enormous lion-maned sun sitting with its chin resting against the horizon.

Another Japanese sunrise from the shores of California.

If I had just stayed home, content to leave this page as it was, I could have allowed myself much more time for self-criticism.

I could have let my day’s opalescent energy turn black and sticky, hanging in little globules from my ribcage.

I could have let all of the words that are now lying across this page pool up in a little dimple in my brain and condense into a mere six letters: C-A-N-C-E-R.

But at least this page would still be blank.

December 2007
Henry Cowell Beach, CA

Well Fuck,

If Vircado could come back to life for one day I’ll bet he wouldn’t spend it inserting data into a computer for a company who doesn’t give a fuck about him.

Beautiful sun-baked day in San Francisco. I opted out of living in it for sixty dollars.

And what is life but a collection of days?

And so we put price tags on our freedom.

How much would you sell the entire thing for? How much have you sold it for?

Back to life now. Spending the stupid money on beers and a hamburger, listening to jazz in a bar.

We were in the Yolla Bolly Wilderness when Vircado announced his new name.

“Vircado, because I’m a virgin and I love avocados.”

We all laughed beneath the cottonwood fluff, and I admired this young, unabashed spark.

He got yanked from this world a year later, only twenty years old, for fuck’s sake.

The universe decided long ago that if two objects are moving fast enough they cannot collide without consequences.

And so we are reminded that we are fleshy and squishable, and so damn precious.

Even so, I punched data into a computer all day long. Hated every moment of it.

And what is life but a collection of moments?

I can’t help but wonder what the old man on my deathbed would want me to do.

I’m sure he’d offer some sage advice and then beg me to stop eating so many hamburgers and drinking so much beer so he could get off the wretched bed and go for one last walk on the coast with his grand-daughter.

Tough luck grandpa, I almost got the bacon cheeseburger and a whisky.

Well fuck,

October, 2007
San Francisco, CA

On Kissing and Sleep

It can be an aggravating species, I’ll give you that.

As a collective we truly are a disaster for this world.

It’s easy to condemn the cloaked man with ice in his heart who is responsible for all of this destruction. To be angry with nasty, self-involved humanity.

Yeah it’s quite simple to be down on people as long as you don’t think about how cute we can be as individuals.

It becomes a much less manageable task to loathe this parasite when you consider that the darling act of kissing is universally valued.

That just about everyone agrees that lying on a soft surface nose to nose with someone else and smooshing lips together with closed eyes is a fantastic thing to do.

That our adorable way of putting a sealed stamp on our attraction to one another is with a wet smack from the kisser.

And the whole idea of requiring sleep is pretty damn precious as well.

Even the cloaked man needs to rest after a long day of malice.

We dedicate the majority of the rooms in our homes to sleeping.

And you’re damned right we want to be comfortable when we do it. A big, squishy rectangle placed right in the center of your room covered in cozy and cuddleable objects.

Or there you are sitting around the campfire for warmth and song, and as the stars descend a little lower, the woodpile thins, the cold settles on the back of your neck,

you all one by one slink off into the darkness to that little spot of ground you cleared for yourself where you heavily collapse and lay still, breathing hard for eight quiet hours.

We really are pretty sweet, despite our killing ways, so tomorrow morning after we rise from our glorious slumber, how about a little making out before we burn down that rainforest over there?

June 2009
Lagunitas, CA