She said: "Somehow we have to co-exist with each other and show respect to the air and to the trees and to the plants and to the waters and to the animals and to the birds and insects and the other life forms that are here with us. We are bound to each other in complex and beautiful ways and where one of us goes, the others must follow. We are all a small part of a larger whole. We walk in each others steps. We must learn to live in other skins and to respect the everythingness of the world that has been given us."

Stumble It!

There is something about airports that makes me feel like my soul is being sucked out of my body through my head somehow. My throat gets dry, and I become itchy, and I loose my focus as I move from one part of the airport that I have landed in on a plane that is late to another part of the airport where my connecting flight is due to leave from in 10 minutes. The distance between "here" and "there" is about 25 miles, or at least feels that far. As I move on and off moving sidewalks, or on and off trams, or end up just flat out running, silently (or not) cursing, holding my two allowed small bags close to me, wanting to stop for 3 ounces of water or to catch my breath or to use the bathroom, but not doing so, I can feel the Dementors and Death Eaters from the Harry Potter books closing in on me, swooping down from the airport skylights, circling around me and pulling my soul out of my body, resulting in an urgent craving for salted peanuts and tiny, tasteless crackers.

Stumble It!

There is something so seductive about an in-ground swimming pool. This is not just any old swimming pool, mind you, but a 1st class, in-ground, drinks-on-the-patio swimming pool with a cover that protects and retracts electronically when the day begins and the pool water is heated by solar panels to 85 degrees or higher so that the 75 degree air feels chilly and it is hard to leave the pool, so you stay and swim laps or not; float maybe, or just look out at the amazing view of the Central Valley of Southern California where Mexican immigrants work hard in the fields to make sure that we are well fed and happy. And, oh, we are. We truly are.

Stumble It!

He was more to be envied than pitied, for his sleep was not a lull or an interval but sleep itself which is the deep and hence sleeping ever deepening, deeper and deeper in sleep sleeping, the sleep of the deep in deepest sleep, at the nethermost depth full slept, the deepest and sleepest sleep of sleep’s sweet sleep. He was asleep. He is asleep. He will be asleep. Sleep. Sleep. Father, sleep, I beg you, for we who are awake are boiling in horror…

Henry Miller

Tropic of Capricorn

Stumble It!

Statistically, there appears to be more women than men and that young people are fewer in number than their parents and that Asians outnumber other ethnic types. This is from a small sampling at the Monterey Aquarium.

Stumble It!

It is so strange to wake up on the other side of American, after coming back from the side where Ti Jean died of alcohol poisoning in 1969 and after unknowingly seeking him out in the canyons and fog of Big Sur. America in 2007 is a strange place anyway, where our luggage was scanned for nitrates and our bodies were patted down with latex gloves. “Is there any place on your body that you are especially sensitive?” The answer would have been: “Yes. The place that you won’t pat down”. So here we are, sleep deprived, on the other side of American from where American started looking for the sanity that it would not find, from where the soul suck would be fought off in that city by the sea and in that fog filled canyon a few bus ride hours away and where the S.U.V.s can now pull up to the Henry Miller library where nothing ever happens and where the ice cream at Ventana will melt on the tongue of an America that can’t really be remembered or found anymore because it wasn’t really there to begin with.

Stumble It!