CORENA CORENA BLACK DOG CORENA

dog and likeness

 

Drove to town today for lunch with friend Bob I've seen from time to time over the last thirty-plus years, though seldom to sit and have a conversation with for an hour. I'm glad he likes La Mexicana, my favorite restaurant in town, where the food is not Tex-Mex. It's cooking as done in Latin America, the cook from La Paz, Bolivia. We have another good Latin restaurant run by Cubans who came here from the Canary Islands, Las Palmas. Also a new Tex-Mex restaurant that is nice. And the one that has been here for years, Mis Arados (My Plow), known as the best restaurant in Sparta since it opened. It is family owned. The kids that were toddlers, waddling among the people at tables spreading cheer with their glowing round faces, are grown up now, worked through high school as waiters in the restaurant, and now have husbands, wives and babies. One beautiful young woman I watched grow up in there, I saw at the gas station a few weeks ago, she had a baby in the car. I said, "You have a baby." She said, "I have three." My jaw bounced off the cement between my feet like a golf ball.

curled up waiting

 

Next stop, the grocery store for donkey carrots, then the drug store where I saw Teena, who gifted me Sofia, and hardware store. From town out to Stratford, a township in the western part of the county, to deliver my friend Carole's Christmas present. We don't do that. However, I saw a book in Chris Davis's shop about Zentangles, which I knew Carole did not have and needed. I'd have bought it on sight for her in August, or any other month. I called it a Christmas present due to time of year. I drove home over the mountain on Spicer Mountain Road that connects hwy 221 with hwy 18 at Whitehead, singing, "good dog Corena," simple words dog can understand from words I speak to her. It is a slow road with curves galore, a third of it mud on a rainy day like today, though not bad, and great scenery, blue mountains in the distance, black cows in the foreground, the meadows still green on a short-sleeve day two days before Christmas. The girl at the grocery store register was one I didn't remember seeing before. I looked at her name tag. Corena. Bells rang all over the inside of my head. Why hadn't I thought of it yet?

   dog at home  

 

I'd been feeling that Rena was missing something the name needed, unable to find what it was. It was like the name Rena was too lean, needed some fat on her bones. I was thinking of calling her Black Rena driving into the parking lot, spoke it a few times to hear it and liked it. Thought of the song, Black Betty. Great name for a dog, but she's not a Betty. I think it was the way the girl at the register spelled Corena that caught my eye. She was gorgeous with black wavy hair. Lots of new spellings these days. My favorite is Mysti. I also know a Karina. Co-Rena. Rena modified. It fits and flows with Sofia. In sound, o-e-a, only the C-n and the S-f distinguish them from one another. Yet the names have very different sounds. Sofia is soft as a down cushion. Corena, too, is soft with a sense of self-assertion, like bear fur. All the way to Carole's and all the way home I sang Corrina Corrina, "I love Corrina, tell the world I do." I was out there on the highway in the rain singing to my new dog, "Corena Corena, won't you come on home, aint had no lovin since you been gone."

dog says I wish it would stop raining

so I could go outside and bark

 

I remembered Aster, and having no dog for eight years, like Corena was Aster come home after being gone so long, riding the mountain roads in her seat again. The feeling is very much like having Aster return after long absence. Wherever this dog's soul came from, she found her way to me. She has the same soulful eyes as Aster. I know it is the breed of dog, lab mix, that determines much of their behavior, personalities and thinking. It's not the same dog, but like the same dog. What more could I ask? A chance to have Aster back as a young dog. Curiously, it's like we already know each other. Today was dog's day to learn by experience another aspect of living here, riding in the car and waiting for sometimes a few hours. I keep windows open enough to let air pass through, but not for her to escape. Twice I left her in the car for an hour and twice for a half hour. I took her out for a chance to pee after the first hour but she did not. Let  her out later and she did not need to. I put her outside for bathroom before we left. After we'd been home a few hours, after my nap, I sat with her and thanked her for being a patient riding companion today, thanked her for finding me, hugged her, told her she has legs like a deer and beautiful eyes. Big yawn.

corena corena

 

 

*



SEEING CAROLE

angel over whitehead

landmark church

Pleasant day today, good day to get out and go for a drive through the mountains on backroads and highway, curves in the roads this way and that, curves that turn into a nuisance overdriven, hit the brakes, swerve across the yellow lines, back, give it some gas, turn the steering wheel, hit the brakes, give it some gas. Find the speed for a smooth flow up and down, back and forth, the car flows like a boat on ocean waves, land waves, and the curves become a joy to drive. When I find the groove and somebody comes up behind me, they're on their own. I'm not going to speed up, crank the steering wheel, hit the brakes, give it gas, hit the brakes over some guy in a pickup and a ballcap wanting to struggle his way over the mountain, likes the physical activity of it, likes the tension, wants to ride my rear end like he wants to push me. As happened today on a long stretch of curves, a guy came up behind me in a black pickup and I stepped on the gas to get away from him. I can drive the curves faster than is sensible, but don't like to. Sometimes I will for practice. Today was practice. Sometimes I drive with right side tires on the white line for practice. I like an automatic awareness of where my tires are, a cautious driver, who's been told I'm hyper-vigilant, it's ok with me whatever it's called. I've not had any wrecks. Driving is the most dangerous thing I ever do. I don't need a law to wear a seatbelt. Driving is hyper-dangerous. I need to know what is going on in the rearview mirror as well as the windshield. Somebody riding grabs my steering wheel once, never does it again. I'm not violent or threatening, but I'm clear. I can talk and listen while driving, but attention is on the road.

carole

The occasion to get out and ride some backroads was inspired by the morning's phone conversation with my friend, Carole, whose car was in the shop for an unknown number of days, she was down to two cigarettes and out of Coffee Mate. Familiar with fear of running out of an inebriate, I said I'd go to town and get her some. No. Don't do that. I can make it. I said, No point in making it when I can easily find some Coffee Mate and the cigarettes and bring them to you. Oh no, too much trouble, I have two cigarettes left, I can make them last the day, maybe have one a day. What are friends for if not to make a cigarette run? I said it is so much easier for me to drive to town and bring you some cigarettes than it is for you to sit there and stare out the window wishing you had a cigarette for the next three days. It's not like I don't want to see you. When we finished our conversation, I headed Catfish up the road, a good day to ride the land waves. Overcast some and cloudy some, on the verge of rain some. Three times I needed to run the wipers one beat. That's not even trying to rain. It's barely trying to sprinkle. The roads were still wet from the night rain. Almost no traffic on the paved roads, none on the gravel roads. The landscape of fresh leaves recently opened, the early green of spring everywhere in the trees, in the meadows, rhododendron and mountain azalea in bloom, deep blue sky, big cotton puffs of clouds with gray undersides drift on slow-moving air, a fish's view of boats in a fishing tournament. 

carole

Drove out 221 to Stratford, a road with the name of being crookeder'n the back of a runnin snake. Then up at least a half mile of crooked driveway with holes and ruts, straight down on one side for awhile. From the road, it goes straight uphill for a long ways like that first hill on a rollercoaster. At the top it curves around to the right and to the left and to the right and left and down the hill and up the hill, to the left to the right, up the hill, to the left, up the hill and land on the pad at the top. The house, built into the side of the mountain, has almost disappeared in the growth around it. From the parking space to the entrance/exit door the ground is covered with moss. Inside, a modest, modern house. Out the sliding glass door of a living room wall, a mountain vista. A small porch close to the ground. A young groundhog took up under the porch last year. This year, she or he has a mate. It won't be long til baby groundhogs will be wiggling around the postage stamp lawn where deer sometimes graze, rabbits nibble, turkeys peck, a coyote passes through, a blacksnake. She never goes out there, the only human activity and scent would be the guy who mows and weedeats a few times a summer. Occasionally, a squirrel, a groundhog, and a few others have come up to the glass and looked at her like she was in a zoo. And she's watching them like in a wall-sized terrarium. We sat and talked, had a couple cups of tea, smoked some cigarettes, her uncertainty settled. We talk every day on the phone, so it's not like we have problems talking. We can talk as long as we feel like it. We flow well together like a mountain road and a car at moderate speed rolling with the waves. We have no limits to where we go conversationally, wide open and free. 

carole

I have said that Jr Maxwell is the one man I have known I call wise without hesitation, besides another who lives in a monastery. Carole is the one woman I have known I call wise without hesitation, besides another who lived in comparable to a monastery. I feel divinely blessed in that I have had the opportunity to know well a man and a woman I take for wise as assuredly as I take Caterpillar for a cat. Younger, and actually all my life, I have sought and wondered if I'd ever find someone wise. I thought I'd have a better chance finding somebody with wisdom in the mountains more readily than in a city. Jr was already here. Carole came here around twenty years ago. It was like as soon as we met we needed to know each other, it had to be. She  lives where she lives, I live where I live, we're here for ourselves and at the same time here for each other. Like in AA having a friend to call and talk with to quell the need for a drink. She is on her path, I am on mine. Our paths run side by side through this time of our lives. We believe we were given each other to walk our paths with, friends who understand one another without emotional tensions. She is my feminine representative of the Master. Of course, I would drive to town to buy her some cigarettes, and deliver them, sit and visit for awhile, face to face. Suffering? Sacrifice? I don't think so. We often forget our friends like to do something to help us out when help is needed. It is a gift to give a friend a chance to lend a hand. I'm quick to jump to lend a friend a hand, forgetting, or just not thinking that my friends would like to jump with the same intent to lend me a hand when needed. Carole forgets that too. So we remind one another from time to time. 

carole

*

CONCEPTION OF A NEW ART PROECT

jenny

Went out in the morning to take carrots and hay to the donkeys in two degree air and a quarter inch of fine, dry, slick, crystalline snow. Rhododendron leaves were hanging straight down curled up tight as green pencils. Donkeys danced and squealed, brayed, bumped each other, snorted. They took the carrots like they'd not had anything yet to eat, remains of yesterday's hay covered with snow. They stood in their shed waiting to hear the Ice Cream Man's footsteps in his barn. By the time I reached the window where I could see them, they were walking out of their den and stood at the fence looking at me through the window. They were cold to the bone. I could see it in the way they slam-danced when I went out the door. It was different from usual; their movements were tighter, fluid, though not warm fluid. In motion by force of habit, too excited to stand still. They may be able to take it, thick hair makes a good blanket; below ten degrees is cold even wrapped in a polar sleeping bag. Both had a good mood about them. Donkeys are, indeed, rugged. I threw hay over the fence for them and returned to my barn. Made some Ethiopian coffee, settled in, read a few pages of Chris Hedges, and called Carole. Mostly I talked about my new project, an outdoor sculpture, explained it and the construction in detail, visualizing as I talked, She helped with some questions, was encouraging, as always. An hour of talking about it, I visualized the process of construction, building the big outdoor one and the small model, while we talked, back and forth, not just one way. Talked with Justin yesterday, told him I need his help on an art project. I really do need his help. It will take some carpentry skills I can do a rough version of, but he can do right.

new project

An hour of talking with Carole about it, feeling like Christo and Jean-Claude, a minor likeness, collaborating in the conception, walking through the process in our minds' eyes, making aesthetic and construction decisions together, I built it in my mind. It was done. Now is the time to start. We got off the phone and I started setting up the small plywood board handy for a table top on the footstool. Found a strip of some fir standing in a corner, just the right length for the three lengths of wood. Put a new blade on the hand-jigsaw, fir is some hard wood for driving nails in, sawing or drilling. The wood for the project itself will be square. The wood for the model is rectangular, eliminating making an exact replica at the beginning. Didn't want to make the model exact. Let it be itself. The bigger one to be made on the same principle, not exact. Needed two stove bolts, four eye-screws, two small s-hooks, string and a rock, all of which could be found in a collection of bolts, screws, nails and so forth. Looked around at rocks I have laying about and found a white one like the big one I want to use. Got out the drill and the extension cord, ready to go. A puzzle where I make the parts as well as put them together. Justin dropped by to use his pickup to bring six bales of hay from the barn to the donkey feeding station. I went out to assess the path to the barn hoping the snow would allow me to pull the car down in the hole and get out. I saw  his truck at the barn and felt blessed. We stacked the hay and put the tarp over it.. He came to the house for a cigarette and I told him the project, showed him the model and asked for some counsel on using treated wood. He said treated wood costs about a tenth of untreated. He said the hardware stores in this area, forty mile radius, have to special order untreated wood.  He said the treated wood takes three or four months to dry out, to let the moisture from the treatment escape the wood or no paint will stick to it. He said it will reject the finish put on before the drying process is completed.

new project

It's looking like the first one will go up raw, treated wood. The blue-green tint of the treated wood, is, after all, what it is. I'll buy the wood this week or next and start the drying process. It looks like June before the wood is ready for finishing. Thought I might buy wood to make two of the objects, put one together right away and save the other to put together later using paint. I might want to make two, anyway. The first one will have to be raw wood. I actually like it better for the unfinished aspect of it. We talked at length about securing it to the ground, considering the time or two a year a big wind comes through, the rock could start swinging and swing the construction out of balance, collapsing it. He suggested putting each of the three legs a foot or more into the ground. Great plan. However, I added I'm not sure about digging holes in a lawn to be refilled when the thing has had its day. I brought up driving a length of re-bar a couple feet long into the ground at each foot. He suggested drilling holes in the end of each one to drive the re-bar through. He knows somebody who can cut and shape the re-bar to specs. Bringing his mind into the project is a practical step. As I knew he would, he appreciated the mechanics of the thing and sees exactly what I want. I feel a little bit like Ai Weiwei, hiring craftsmen to make his art objects he doesn't have the skills or knowledge to make himself. Justin answered in a short time my questions about the construction and how to do things, like cut the notches, I can only do approximately, and he can do exact. He will make the construction's mechanics artful. The joint where two pieces of wood fit together will be a tight fit, and the angle of the holes drilled for the bolts will be right.

justin puts on his winter over-hauls

I like associations with my friends where we help each other as needed. I've known Justin all his life, we've been friends since he was a child, like I'm friends with his girl, Vada, now. He knows I can be trusted with his baby girl from all the times I baby-sat with him and his sister, Sheena, and being his adult friend all the way through his childhood. He needs help with something I can do, he's got it. I need help with something he can do, I've got it. No questions of why, just when. He won't let me pay him for this. We don't accept pay for helping each other. I have full confidence the finished product will be done right by somebody with a good mind and experience with carpentry. He could build an entire house by himself, though would do it like a contractor, hiring helpers for specific jobs. If I make two, which I think I will, if one or both are sold and I make a modest amount of money for them, I'll give it to Justin. I'm in balance with my fixed income, and it's not so easy for him and Crystal with a house, day-care, jobs, utility expenses, insurance, vehicles, on and on. All problems are solved toward the project. It's now a matter of when the snow clears and the temperature rises above freezing. He will go with me to select the wood. Justin has known me an artist, painter, all along his way. He is having fun with the idea of helping me construct an art object. It's important for me and it's important for him, each in our own ways. When it comes to naming the artist, I'll use both our names, a collaboration. I like the idea of making two. I know I can move one of them on right away. The second one will be painted. Original idea was to paint it. Then I liked raw wood better. May put the second one up at home. Now that I've committed my mind to the first one raw, I like it even better with the bluish tint in the raw wood impervious to the ground and rain. Won't even sand it. Use it straight off the lumber rack. I feel like a surfer who found a good wave, standing up on the board, flowing with the groove. .

here comes the snow

*

PAT AND JOHN AND THE OLD-TIME FIDDLE

vincent van gogh

It's been a couple days of good vibrations all day long, good feeling, good vibes, good friends. This morning started with a phone call minutes after I woke up. From then on, seeing people of the first circle around my heart, friends of many years. Friend I wrote of yesterday, our forgiveness story, called wanting to know where he can find a banjo for his youngun, who wants to learn to make music. He has talked with the kid at length about school sports like football: kids come out of football with permanent physical problems, and when you're out of school, football is over. He told the kid if you want to learn something after school, learn to make music. You can play a banjo the rest of your life into old age. Why do something that comes to nothing when it will only bring you broken bones and concussions? I felt like it was sound counsel to be passing to a kid just starting out in his life. I feel like making music would be an immense help to the kid all the way through school and the rest of his life. If he takes to it, the great unknown. He talked at length. The donkeys heard my footsteps in the house and were braying for me to bring carrot and hay. Caterpillar wanted her catfood. She maoed repeatedly unto the pleading mao with the upturn at the end. All I could do was show her my open hand to mean, not now. She finally gave up in frustration, turned and went to the bedroom to her bed. He kept on talking, donkeys at the fence pleading to me with their eyes through the window. I went to the refrigerator, put three carrots in a pocket and went out the door with the phone. I didn't have to talk. I carried the wireless phone taking carrots to the donkeys, fed them carrot chunks with the phone in one hand. At the moment I thought he was done, he needed to tell me about a bar-B-Q place to take somebody I really want to impress. You can get out of there for less than ten dollars. He described every detail in the place, exactly how to get there. It seems like it could have been annoying, but it was not. This is one of the few people whose dark side I know as well as the light side. His dark side is definitely from hell, hell within, and his light side is a wonderful human being with a true heart. A mountain boy, who is who he is and no apologies. 

vincent van gogh

He talked the whole time I gave Jack and Jenny their morning carrots, and let me go when I was about ready to throw them hay, needing two hands. I was amused. He's funny when he gets going, tells good stories, explains endlessly and makes everything funny, except when he's talking about the twenty people that want to kill him, "and four of them mean it." Keeps him alert. I figure it keeps his heart pumping. It's his life he made for himself the way he wants it. It's his business, not mine, unless I happen to be around when the drive-by he's expecting with A-Ks occurs. He was funny to listen to, as always, like a stand-up comic with a telephone and an audience of one. Adjusting the blue tarp over the bales of hay, John and Pat's car came down the road and parked by the mailbox. I was still in the clothes I slept in--even slept in a sweater last night, it that kind of cold--with a jacket on to keep out the cold. They came inside and we talked awhile. I suggested I make some Ethiopian coffee and they wanted to go to town to eat, it being almost noon. I thought what the hell: I probably smell fairly rank in the clothes I wear at home. I've managed my wardrobe such that I sleep in the clothes I wear during the day at home. If I don't go to town for four days, I wear and sleep in the same clothes for four days. I think I'd slept two nights in what I wore today. I told myself that everywhere we go, I'll know people and they all know my scent anyway. If they didn't before, this their day. Therein lies the freedom that goes with white hair and a certain age. If I carried a cane, people would open doors for me. That sorry old man can't take care of hisself no more. It's with this license I put a hat on going out the door, no more concerns about my scent preceding me. Pat and John and I are close enough that we fart with no problem. We drove to town to the Tex-Mex restaurant, Mis Arados, had a good brunch and good conversation. They live near Hillsdale, NY, on the Massachusetts line. Pat said she can see Massachusetts from her kitchen window. I likened her to Sarah Palin, who makes us both bend over laughing and throwing up at the same time.  

vincent van gogh

Pat and I go back to 1975 in Charleston. In the next year, I moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains and she moved to NYC. She and John met in the City and have been together ever since. They reproduced twice, two intelligent, beautiful grown girls, who have a personal friend relationship with their mother and will all their lives. She is who she is and she has allowed her girls who they are. All their lives they've had a free-thinking character for a mother. John is the same kind of dad for them. He has watched Wizard of Oz at least a hundred times with one of his babies sitting on one leg, the other on the other leg, watching it with them every time they wanted to see it. The girls grew up feeling safe that John was their papa. Both Pat and John stood up for them, caught them, encouraged them along. They're both fabulous women now. I mean by fabulous, my own estimation of them as what I call true human beings, women who, like their mother, are who they are, no apologies. They are people I'm humbled by the opportunity to know. I saw them grow up and was awed by them through childhood and on up. I feel blessed that these are my dear friends. That they are my friends is certainly a blessed experience. John was looking for a hand-made fiddle. I called a musician friend in SW Virginia and asked for some tips on who is making fiddles and has them for sale. He gave me the name of one in Boone, then added he had one for sale, one he's owned for several years and played a lot; in fact, played it that morning. I told him we'd be by there in a few hours, will have lunch and hit the road. John has a friend who plays fiddle and offered to teach him to play for no charge. John wants to learn something challenging to exercise brain in a time of life when you use-it-or-lose-it. He assessed the fiddle a considerable challenge. Friend told him to start with a good fiddle. Since he's going to the Blue Ridge, he'll have a good chance to find one hand-made. 

vincent van gogh

The fiddle is made by Robert Glier, of Cincinnati,1855-1924. He evidently was known for a lot of fiddle for the bucks. It has a rich, full sound. It has tiger striped wood on the back and the neck. The man made violins all his working life. He left Germany age 30. I'd say he learned his craft in Germany, more than likely an apprentice, trained in the old world way of fiddle making, sound its purpose. I'd reckon these mountains have a number of his fiddles, especially up around Kentucky, West Virginia, eastern Ohio, Virginia. A lot of traditional music has been played on Glier's fiddles. That my friend who sold it, Scott, owned it is a testament to its sound. He's been buying his instruments from friends in the region who make fiddles. I suspect he needed to get rid of the one that was not made locally to help pay for a new one by someone he knows. John was happy with his find. The price was right, the source was right, the time was right, the fiddle was right. He's looking forward to showing future fiddle teacher his find. We fell into a good flow the whole time they were here. None of us had an agenda, none of us was in a hurry, we relaxed and went with the flow. On the way back I suggested we stop by and see my friend Carole, who I wanted to meet them and them to meet her. I called her on John's cell phone. She was receptive to a drop-in. Carole fell into our flow, like stepping into the boat with us, and we had an open, free-flowing conversation in a circle in her sitting area, which just happened that way. Good vibes. They were as if they'd known each other twenty or more years. Before Carole's, we ran into a friend of Carole's and mine, Beth, when Pat was shopping for a wire for her i-pad to facilitate something I don't understand, which could be anything, how to turn it on.            

vincent van gogh by himself

*

THE RHODODENDRON WALKING STICK

two views of today's finished stick

new rhododendron walking stick

Another walking stick is leaning against the wall to dry after first coat of tung oil. Two days of carving I only whacked my fingers half a dozen times. None of them were blood-letters, just nicks. I've thought about putting a bandaid around the thumb I hit 4 times. It's like wearing gloves putting up barbed wire. In the early years on the farm I'd wear leather gloves to stretch barbed wire. Put on the gloves, stretch the wire, hold it in place, take off the gloves take hammer and staple, hammer it into place. Put gloves back on to handle the barbed wire, then take them off again. There comes a time I stuff the gloves into my back pockets and do the best I could to keep from the scratches being too bad. Old man Tom Pruitt's hands dripped blood after he'd put up a barbed wire fence. He never wore gloves. It wasn't long before I didn't either. A few years ago I ran into hillbilly country singer Raymond Oakes. We talked a little and I noticed the backs of his hands had a webbing of scars that looked made by a spider on acid. Exactly like the back of old man Tom's hands. I said to Raymond, "Stretched much barbed wire?" He said, "Yeah, stretched some helping my daddy." Had I continued with the farm work, the backs of my hands would look like that. I have a pretty fair beginning. They're my tattoos. Now I'm in process of putting new scars on the hands, this time the fingers. Putting protection on the fingers doesn't feel right. It takes away from the raw interaction of the knife and the wood. It feels elemental to me. A tool of only one moving part and a piece of wood. Sharpen knife and carve. I have to call it carving instead of whittling or shaving the wood. It is carving from first swipe of the knife to last. Yesterday I carved the bark off this rhododendron branch that has been dead a few years Today I cleaned it up with the knife, an even more painstaking process than stripping the bark. It's detailed carving and smoothing tiny places. It's an excellent meditation. Focus of attention is close. My fingers are at stake. I have to be aware of every move consciously. 

the stick and the knife

I love carving rhododendron wood. Enjoyed the poplar and dogwood too. I've messed with wood all my life, but it feels like carving these walking sticks I'm discovering wood for the first time. I want to carve different kinds of wood now. I've sawed wood, sanded it, run a planer over it, painted it, but never carved it. Never had purpose. I've never kept the pocketknife sharp for not wanting to cut self using it. Now, for the first time in my life, I am keeping the pocketknife as near razor sharp as I'm able. Cutting wood doesn't seem to dull the blade. It keeps a good edge. It feels sometimes like wood's purpose is to be carved. Again, the giving tree. Suddenly I understand that African masks were carved by people who carved wood, good at it unto masters in later years. I am learning subtleties of using a knife carving wood. There are many approaches to the wood. I kept three prongs at the end that touch the ground for novelty. The idea is to be walking on the ground. It would be excellent footing on the ground. Maybe. I did it because I liked the idea and believe they won't break. I like using the knot where branches leave the main branch for the tip that touches the ground. It won't split. It was fun digging with the front part of the blade between the three prongs pictured above. Every place along the stick where a branch came out, I carved down to a smooth round bump that flows with the shape of the stick. Rhododendron limbs make a crooked line between the handle and tip that is a straight line in the stick's balance. Functionally, it is a straight line, same as a straight stick. But it goes this way and that, which doesn't mess its balance up at all. I hypothesize the bends give it spring a straight stick could not. As I pick these limbs to carve, spring is foremost in my mind. The spring is, essentially, negligible. One thing I see it does is vibrate like a bass string and a straight stick vibrates like a high string. Maybe it is a consideration of resonance, whatever resonates with a given individual. 

the handle after carving off the bark

  

Incorporating the scar in the limb into the stick's design was fun. The hand fits nicely between the knot above and the crook below. It is made for the hand the way a pistol grip is made to fit the hand. The stick hangs straight down from the handle held lightly. I sit here at the desk, the pocket knife lies open to my right. I've learned to admire it for what it can do. I've begun to have a feel for its physicality. It is tool of exquisite design. Folds up, goes in the pocket. Open, it is locked open the same as if it did not have a hinge. It is a Case Sodbuster made  in 1977. I've known of Case knives from displays in hardware stores, heard about them, thought it was one of a few makers of knives. I looked online and found a very long list of knife makers. I'm partial to my Sodbuster. Of all the pocket knives I've carried, this is the one. I like the feel of holding it. It has a good balance. The blade holds a sharp edge, it's practical. One of my friends said one day years ago, "I've never carried a pocket knife." I spoke automatically, "Carry one once and you always will." Don't need it much, but when I do, I need it. It's like carrying a pen. I always carry a pen in my pocket when I go to town. And always regret it when I forget. Don't always need one, but when I forget one, that's the day I need it. All pocket knives I'd ever seen had three blades. It's not like I'm an aficionado of pocket knives. This was the first single blade knife I'd seen. First thought: how practical. I've never used more than one blade on knives I used in the past. Talking with my friend Carole, she has her dad's pocket knife. It was the only thing of his she wanted. After he died, she snitched the knife knowing no one would miss it. It is a Schmidt & Ziegler made in Solingen, Germany. It is the common pocket knife. She said he only used the small blade. Again, I thought: how practical.

the handle finished

Today, carving the stick the second time, I wondered why I am doing this. For enjoyment. I like carving right now. May not two weeks from now, but right now carving is what I'm doing. I may sell them if anybody will buy them and may give them away or both. It's a meditation, not a regimen. I've found sitting with a stick carving on it with a sharp knife requires immediate focus of attention. It clears the mind. I like the focus. The consequence of lifting focus for a second is a sliced finger. Focus keeps my fingers safe. Every touch of the knife requires sharp focus. Earlier today, I was feeling like I wanted to write, wanted to read, wanted to watch a movie, all at once. I picked up the knife and stick, went outside, turned over the five-gallon bucket and proceeded to carve. Turned the radio onto the interview program, Fresh Air, followed by Robin Young, then The World. Good interviewers, interesting people they talk with, and I find The World always interesting. I carve and hear in the air well-educated people talk about interesting subjects. I find that with focus on every movement with the knife I hear what they're saying better whether it's the emergence of ISIS in Iraq or the lives of Tibetan women in India. I like BBC radio at night. They tell a lot of Africa news. Africa has a mystique for me from the Pyramids to the Kalahari. Lawrence Durrell's novels, The Alexandria Quartet, were set in North Africa, Alexandria, Egypt. I think of Africa the world of our origin. I think of wood as one of humanity's great teachers. The other, rock. I could  have been a rock mason in this life happily. I have the same appreciation for rock as for wood. Basic, least moving parts, foundational. And I appreciate the life in the wood. The shape of the wood is its life. Carving away the bark I get down to the beautiful wood, caress it with sandpaper and rub the tung oil into it, changing it from something pretty to something beautiful instantly. Carving on the rhododendron branches I remind self from time to time, this is it, this is basic element.

the first rhododendron stick

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MOSH PIT PARTICIPANT

adolph gottlieb

It has been an odd day with a smooth, even flow. Turned in last night late, up early, drank coffee, talked with Carole, looked at facebook and went back to sleep for a few hours. Woke refreshed, almost ready to go. Put on a dvd from netflix that arrived yesterday, Punk Is Not Dead. It was made in 2007. I had the impression from its blurb that it would be the English punkers from the mid 1970s. Turned out it followed the American West Coast hard core punk bands like Black Flag, NOFX, Adicts, the Cramps. The film was concert footage and interviews with people from the bands of late 70s and the 80s into the 90s, people from the bands who are grown up now and still love the music, some still playing it. My particular liking for punk is from London in the mid 70s and New York in mid 70s. I was looking forward to a documentary of the London punk scene. They are very different. London punk was largely people who went to art school, where the kids went who wanted to get a band going. The Clash met at art school. Siouxsie Sioux went there. The London punkers had an arty air that was taken for anger by the press. It was also a scene of street kids with parents they left to live on the streets. Like one pop generation after the other, they needed a style that would freak out authorities and adults in general, as well as the generation before them. Their style was every bit as abrasive to the adults as the hippies before them and psychedelic rock. After 40 years of punk, Sixties guitar solo psychedelia sounds to my ear what I call orchestra rock. I still like the Allman Bros, Santana, Blind Faith, Led Zeppelin, the Stones and many others, but when I want to put on some rock, it turns out to be what came next, the punk period and its influence. At the time Bob Dylan went electric, the music was in the last days of the Fifties period. He cranked it up, a new sound and it became "rock," rocknroll being left to define the Fifties sound. 

adolph gottlieb

Hardcore American punk has a different attitude and a different feeling. It comes from a different culture. London and LA are very different cultures, though also somewhat similar. Both cities have a lot of street kids. The hardcore punk is about "slam dancing" in mosh pits. Big guys, high school and college football player kinda guys, the white ones, bash each other with everything they've got. I wondered for a few seconds how many of them were college campus rapists; guestimated a large number. It was a big angry knot in frenetic motion. You have to be big just to stand on your feet in a mosh pit. It's an interesting phenomenon to witness. I saw a big one in Charlotte at an all day into the night outdoor concert, none of it punk, though some of the bands had something of a charging rhythm sometimes. The mosh pit was huge. I went to stand in the big circle of people watching from outside the frenzied knot. It was amazing to me to see there were so many young guys who get their kicks banging into each other furiously with the hardcore rhythm and guitars pumping them into a frenzy, the people our society calls normal. I saw the corporate execs of the future doing their wild thang, memories to tell and laugh about at cocktail parties in twenty years. In the air above the mosh pit a phenomenon was occurring I'd never imagined ever seeing and will never see again. People from outside the pit were throwing plastic bottles of water and other drinks, cans too, into the pit. People in the mosh pit were throwing them out. A dome occurred over the mosh pit of thousands of bottles flying from the circle around the pit into the pit and thousands of bottles flying out of the pit into the circle around it. Somebody's Birkenstocks were in the mix. At one moment I saw a full water bottle flying in my direction. It was like being in a gun fight and seeing the bullet in the air on its way that was mine. No time to duck. Direct hit in the solar plexus. It was about like a donkey kick, a solid thump. It didn't hurt. Nothing to do but pick the bottle up and throw it back into the pit. Thus my mosh pit experience. 

adolph gottlieb

We had a misty drizzle of rain much of the day. It was the kind of misty rain that makes the slickest ice there is. You can't even stand up on it. I can't say I enjoyed the documentary a great deal. I liked the music. Interviews with guys in their late 40s with freaky hairdos, a chain around the neck with a lock, looking too much like old guys trying to look young, like all the white pony tails with bald heads down front at a Rolling Stones concert in recent years. Everybody wore cool tshirts. I have a hard time looking at somebody fifty done up in teenage style. Makes me doubt their credibility for anything. I remind self these are city guys, the women too, who have spent their entire adult lives in teen styles to the point it's their own personal who I am. From the perspective of almost 40 years in the mountains, city styles make me shudder. The style in the mountains is poor-man. Wear dressy clothes and your friends look at you askance and wonder who you're trying to impress. They'll let you know right away you don't impress them. They know you too well. In mountain tradition you don't dress better than the next man. It's seen as showing off, something that gets inhibited in mountain kids in their first year. You can show off having a bigger pickup than the next guy; it shows you can afford the payments. But you don't dress better than the next guy or dress to stand out. I've lived in this culture, in this style so long it has become my own personal who I am. I liked the concert footage, the bands jerking around, flinging their heads about, assaulting the guitars, making them scream in-yer-face attitude to the rhythm of a woodpecker on speed. The old guys with several piercings in their noses and ears, lips, hair cut some dramatic way cracked me up when they were talking about the punk scene in the days it was happening and new. My automatic response when I see somebody fifty dressing like a teenager on tv, it's about the same as hearing somebody say epiphany for epitome. One of those things you pretend not to hear, but can't get it out of your mind.

adolph gottlieb

Right away I saw the film for the day was not going to hold my attention very well. The music was ok, and the talking was historically interesting, but no more. Henry Rollins doesn't trip my trigger. I saw his band Henry Rollins Band in 91, his band after Black Flag. I'm inclined to his kind of music, but his persona is beyond anything I can take an interest in. Big city tough guy needs anger management help, bad, covered up in tattoos like he thinks he's a dragon or something awesome. A rock star. He's an actor playing the role of somebody out of control bi-polar with prison in his near future. The Marine bad guy. I saw him in one of the Wrong Turn, West Virginia movies -- this is not a recommendation. He has some one-man rants available on netflix. I saw one. The first five minutes of it was enough, though I sat through it. I simply find his persona boring. I find Bruce Springsteen's persona boring too. Rollins band could rock and roll for sure. It was just his Marine Corps pretend that threw me. That mind fails to impress me even when it's not pretend. At the beginning of the film I saw it was West Coast hardcore and lost interest. A couple days ago I cut a rhododendron branch that had been dead a few years, cut it to length for a walking stick and shaved the bark from it the full length, whittled the knobs and both ends, rounding and smoothing them. I arranged a place on the floor at my feet to catch shavings and went over the length of it again shaving off everything missed taking off the rough part. It was exacting, detail work, making for good focus. I let the music play and I heard the talk without looking at the forty-somethings locked in their cases of arrested development. I shaved the rhododendron stick down to bare bone and smoothed it with the pocket knife. I went over it with three pieces of sandpaper, wearing each one out, made the stick flawless to the touch. The film over, I wiped the dust off the stick with a dry washcloth, applied the first coat of tung oil by hand. I did not know what to expect of the rhododendron all along the process. The tung oil gave it a touch of honey.

       

adolph gottlieb

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GRUMPY OLD BASTARD REBEL WITH ATTITUDE

antoni tapies

This morning talking on the phone with my friend Carole, I was talking about how paranoid I've become about driving. An alarming number of people I know have been given tickets over the last year. I've not seen it in the past anything like it is now. The state has it set so you don't get out of a ticket for less than $200. The ticket may be less, but court costs and fees run it up. Obviously, the highway patrol has increased the quotas for patrolmen, keeping state revenues up in a time when the working people of the state are bringing in less income, hence paying less taxes. What do you do? Screw the working poor. They're easy to rape. They have no recourse. You never see a Cadillac by the side of the road with a highway patrol car behind it, blue lights flashing. The attitude of cops toward we the people has become more hostile, year by year, to the point we "citizens" (a dead word) are taken for criminals, treated like criminals, spoken to as criminals. They think they're being smart in the manner of arrogant people. They're making enemies and stand all the taller for it. This is why we did not want police state. Now it's a law that police departments are right to exclude the more intelligent applicants from a job as a cop. I thought that was already a natural law. It's like making a law requiring us to observe gravity. Throw something up in the air and if it keeps on going you're arrested. I said a whole lot more than this, talking with Carole, that I'm too paranoid to repeat in print. Paying the fine is bad enough, then the hell you're put through from the moment you see the blue light until it's finally over, regarded a criminal every step along the way. Franz Kafka and George Orwell were prophets. We are now living in the adult world they foresaw. I lived it throughout childhood and youth, as have many. It is particularly reprehensible to see Kafka become the way of American enforcement. It must be inevitable, a process, a pattern. We laugh now at the old slogan, to serve and protect, like we laugh at wind, rain, sleet or snow, except in a Jerry Lee Lewis song.

 

 

antoni tapies

 

I was telling Carole that all my adult life cops and people in authority positions dislike me on sight. I don't have to make a face, say something smartass, nothing. They look at me and they see the enemy. It's so close to a hundred percent that I'm used to it. I've learned to go slack in the face of authority the way black people have learned that when a cop stops you, you go slack, be passive, no resistance. Otherwise, they beat the shit out of you, and might anyway. When you're white, it's not so overt. They don't give you respect, but they also don't treat you like a coon. People that go about with a superior attitude regard me exactly the same. On sight, like reading an aura, an authoritarian of any sort, official or self-styled, sees the enemy when they see me. I think my eyes have something to do with it. My eyes do not show respect for uniform or position. Nor do they show fear. They show absence of interest. That's what I feel. I know people I would call friends who have been involved in law enforcement in one way or another, people whose egos don't require they be deferred to as authority. The ones that need to be looked up to the most are the ones that hate me. I have this objectionable way of regarding people as who they are themselves, seeing through the transparent mask of appearance. I have this odd way of knowing people for who they are. Like when I saw Maureen Stapleton play Stella in Streetcar Named Desire, I saw Maureen Stapleton playing Stella, an actress, an artist performing a role. I don't know that I've ever lost sight of a performance enough to see just the role. Maybe in childhood I could have, but don't recall. Pre-teens I was in love with actress Claudette Colbert. Susan Hayward, too. Colbert as mother, Hayward as whore. My grandfather kept a picture on the wall of reclining Susan Hayward in his garage. It was the only thing I wanted after grandpa died, but couldn't ask anybody to attempt to mail glass. I imagine it's in a landfill by now.

 

 

antoni tapies

 

I'm recalling the time of the music store. The parking lot was across the street. PhDs were a riot. I could see it in them getting out of the car. It's a certain trim of a beard, a stance, presentably dressed in something English, and professorial patterns in behavior. I like talking and visiting with intelligent, educated people. I like it very much. One comes in the door, I speak, we engage  in brief conversation. Right away I see he is sizing me up, asking test questions, assessing my knowledge in relation to his. That's when I say them for those. It's all it takes. Don't even have to go so far as to say aint. I see the conclusion register in his eyes that it's just another yokel, exactly as per expectation in his wife's home town. I realize in that moment this is not an intelligent, educated individual, and I lose interest too, at the same time. Its in my horoscope. Not many years ago I found a friend from the years just after high school by way of internet. We emailed quite awhile. Turned out he had a PhD in Psychology; mental institutions, teaching at a university, in charge, authority, retired. I got really tired of his emails full of instructions that I am to read Henry Kissinger's memoirs, lists of assignments and essay test questions. I didn't do any of the assignments and sure as hell did not read Henry Kissinger's self-praise. I started writing the blog and he'd quiz me on what I'm talking about, told me to explain this and that, explain, explain, you're wrong, something else is the case. The worst, according to an old Sufi saying, the straw that broke the camel's back, was when he told me to explain something I'd put up in the column on the right, of quotations, the one from the Tao te Ching, Not knowing is true knowledge. Presuming to know is a disease. Another essay question to be graded. All I answered was, "You had to be there." Explain the Tao te Ching to a PhD in psychology? He's Doctor Science: he knows more than I do. Of course he'd heard of Carl Jung. No matter how I would have explained it, he'd have known better than I did. He really didn't get it and I couldn't help him with it. It was too wide a strait for a bridge. It wasn't long after that I told him to quit writing me and unfriended him on facebook. Next thing, I got another list of essay questions to answer. I blocked him from my email. He had become an authority. He let me have it for not addressing him Dr, saying, I have a lot invested in my PhD. I said, I don't give a shit.

 

antoni tapies

 

It's the same with people who believe having more money than I have makes them my superior. I tend not to see it that way, nor do I honor the expectation. They call me strange because my eyes don't light up and grovel in the mud of greed when they speak down to me. I am able to give authority to someone I assess deserves it, like a martial arts sensei, or a meditation master, a teacher of something I want to learn. Just because somebody puts on a certain kind of clothes doesn't mean shit to me. I see an individual human being; their clothes usually show what they want me to think about them. Carole suggested my resistance to authority personnel goes back to daddy. Bingo. He was not right in the head. He did not adhere to the rational. Didn't pay much attention in school. He never saw but one look in my eyes after a certain point, indifference, nothing. Sometimes he'd explode, I want some respect outta you! The kid would think and dare not say: Show me something to respect. My eyes came to show absence of interest. This is what authoritarians trigger in the look they see. I could not talk back or defend self or explain. You cannot control my mind, I am the enemy. I used my eyes to say it. This, I suspect, is the root of why authoritarians and people who need to be seen high up hate me on sight. They see no light of respect in my eyes, the look of the enemy. It kept me in trouble all the time in the Navy; authorities everywhere requiring obeisance in the form of a salute and being called sir. Out of the Navy, I never said sir again but in irony. It runs awfully deep, so deep I choose to leave it be and not bother with changing it. I feel like it serves me well. It keeps me away from people I don't want to be around without any effort on my part. The same as my attitude that anybody too good for a Pruitt is too good for me keeps the pretentious away, indifference to self-importance keeps authoritarians away, too. Win-win.    

 

antoni tapies himself

 

 

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EVERYDAY LIFE AS SPIRITUAL PATH

michael heizer

My friend Carole and I were talking on the phone this morning, as we do every morning, and, as usual, we talked freely in a free-flowing way, whatever comes up. We have nothing to hide from one another, no hesitations about trust, and where our belief systems are concerned, she is the only one I know with mine, and I'm the only one she knows with hers. I believe I can say I know her higher self and she knows mine. I use higher self because it is even hard to find in oneself, let alone somebody else. Our spiritual interior lives are both educated from the East, India in particular. Yet India is only the present location of ancient wisdom that goes all the way back to Neolithic times. I point out that our higher selves look to the East, noting there is nothing in the West to look to for anything having to do with one's interior life, like wisdom. I once told a zealous fundamentalist baptist that I looked to the wisdom of the East, even had a guru. It was all over the place next day that I'm a devil worshipper. That's no big deal. Anybody who knows me, knows it's not so, and people that don't know me, I don't care. Just another anonymous name to gloat in self-righteousness over. I knew that would be next, and said it just to see. He was not somebody I have ever spoken to with anything near the word trust, a preacher's husband, and my respect for this guy is an empty bag. I do things like that to amuse myself when a moment arises. When my buddy Justin was in high school running with a rowdy bunch, more like a crowd, he told everybody to stay away from that old man at Air Bellows, "He'll shoot your ass! He don't care!" Justin didn't tell me what he'd done until a decade later. His dad and I were friends, and Justin had been my friend since he was his baby's age. He said he told them this to keep them from doing shit to me. He said, "I knew the shit they got into, I wanted to keep them away from you." I thanked him, sincerely. I knew the kind of shit they got into, too, though not from the inside like he did.

 

michael heizer

 

Carole and I agree daily that we like not having much future in this world. We tend away from the news and more toward the spiritual, meaning the spirit in everyday life, living in relation to the spirit, the flow of the spirit. Neither of us meditates or goes to workshops or anything to do with "spirituality" and certainly have no involvement with religion. She watches no tv and listens to NPR radio seldom, same as I do. She reads historical novels, mostly, from the library. Every couple weeks she takes home a stack of books. And she reads books having to do with Meher Baba, as do I. My reading is all over the place. I've been interested in contemporary fiction and art films from mainland China over the last decade or more, and the history of China. I like reading American, French and Chinese poetry, as well as American and world fiction. Poetry is the only source I've found in the West that concerns one's interior life, the life we really live. That started changing with the New Age period of the 1980s. I worked in bookstores from 1965 to 1975. Very little spiritual kinds of books were available. What was available was largely out of print and hard to find. Since 1975, spirituality has become a whole new genre of American writing. Some of it is nonsensical and some of it has very practical relevance. It's good to have the whole spectrum to pick from. At the time I fell in with Meher Baba, I was most interested in American poetry, the Twentieth Century, and for the first time realized poetry had been my source for spirituality through the time of the life I rejected all that. Brought up in the belief system of Kansas fundamentalism, which makes Southern fundamentalism look logical, I see the bozo Westboro preacher that died recently from Topeka is a good example of the fundamentalism I came up in. I left that mind like an arrow pulled all the way back as far as it can go and let go. I feel like my life in that time amounted to an arrow being held at full tension until the string almost broke with frustration, anger, confusion, depression, suppression. The arrow took off like a rocket and sent me as far away from that mind inside myself as the full strength of the bow could push it, full speed.  

 

michael heizer

 

The problem I had that I did not know I had in that time of brow-beating religion was not understanding yet that God and religion are about as equal as a flame and a rock. I was rejecting false religion believing it the nature of God. It was fifteen years of peeling away the onion layers of bullshit I'd been fed in the name of God. Getting down to the core of that kind of thinking, it comes from ego, not God. I had to wash my mind of about everything I'd been taught by way of religion, threw the baby out with the bath water. It all had to go. I needed to get myself down to neutral. About the time I had convinced myself to my own satisfaction "God is dead," I learned it is not God that's dead, but religion. Meher Baba taught me that in a very short time, a couple days. God is alive and well and very much active in our everyday lives. That's where God lives, in our everyday lives. Our everyday lives is what all the gospels are about, not wearing a tie to church. God takes a human voice and explains the real thing is in our hearts, our attitudes toward life, extending ourselves to the benefit of others. Not because it's God's commandment. It's simply sound counsel. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you is as much a natural law as gravity. What we put out into the world comes back. Donkeys are the first example to come to mind. They return what they get right now, like cats and children. It is automatic behavior in all living beings to return what we receive immediately. You might say it's the nature of life. I feel like Jesus was saying, use this principle to make your life better, use it for a path to inner peace. Be conscious of words and behavior, mindful. Like Melvin told a friend who is on his way to prison, First one that disrespects you in any way, knock him on his ass. That tells everybody you'll fight and they'll leave you alone. In other words, you give back what you receive right now. It works the other way too. Regard others with inner peace, no hidden agendas, respect, and everything that comes back is of the same nature. If you want to be respected, respect the people around you in every interaction. Soon you'll live in a world full of respect and wonder what happened that changed everybody.

 

michael heizer

  

 I'm thinking about  friend I've not seen in a lot of years. She'd been hanging with an odd bunch of people that kept her on the verge of bonkers all the time. Something changed in her. She came to some new understandings of her relationship to the world around her. Friends started dropping away, so fast and so many she became a little bit hysterical. She was telling me about this on the phone, and I felt I had insight into what was happening, because I'd noticed in myself that when I change within, the people around me change, some fall away and new ones come in. I suggested she wait and see what happens. I said those old friends have to go with your old way of thinking; they're interwoven. With patience, you'll see new people coming in and new circumstances. It was the biggest change of her life. Right away, circumstances started changing for her and more reliable people came into her life. At the time, I wasn't sure that what worked for me would work for her too, but it was all I had to offer. I find in myself, I have cycles too. From one cycle to the next, a rather remarkable change occurs in that some people fall away and others come in. My cycles tend to seven years. In one cycle, I did the radio show at the local AM station of mountain music for seven years. In that time, about all my life had to do with the music in the area. Next cycle I started making videos at regional music venues for YouTube and writing articles about the music of the region for an old-time music magazine. Had the inspiration for the next one today. It won't be until October, giving plenty of time to consider how I want to approach it. I want to write about the Hillbilly Show, an annual event in Sparta for the last 20 years, this the 20th. Theme this year will be music of the county.  I will be the one making video of the whole show to put on dvd for sale to the people that want them. The one we've used in the past to make video of the show puts the equivalent of a cell phone on a tripod and lets it run. I will be doing some hand-held and tripod some, move around, different angles, lively images. Use the zoom. This cycle has about two more years. I went into this cycle curious to see if I'd make it through it. Made it this far.  

 

michael heizer

 

 

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