My best friend Jeanne died last nite.
Very best friends
I've got a few
lost one just last nite
They're the ones, when gone
you got nothing but honey
not one single regret that sticks
of course i wish this and that
one more time for sure i do
one more hug, kiss, dinner, weekend
yes i do baby
like nobody's business i do
but when i reach inside with tears on my cheeks
i find nothing but honey
you sweet, sweet memory of mine
my best so far.
We had two mornings of mandatory training on Customer Service this week at the office. It's difficult when you work for the government, all the customers are forced to pay. Lord help us. Anyway, my notes are above. As with all my doodles, these are best viewed from all four angles.
I just finished this book today and I must say many of his sentences were a bit much, particularly since some things in life should not run on over several pages in my opinion except maybe once or twice, but really, where’s the damn period, it’s just a city street scene for goodness sakes and so all in all I did not enjoy as much of this one as much as On The Road, but in both I like Jack the most when he’s alone, in Washington State watching for fire, top of a remote mountain praying to God, or his trip to Africa and Europe seeing God everywhere he can spin together thoughts and words and sounds and sights and prayers and songs bravely sweet and kind, like a poet and you know how poets are, wanting so much all the damn time.
Of course I want to travel alone, and be free.
From the last chapter, page 173.
There's nothing nobler than to put up with a few inconveniences like snakes and dust for the sake of absolute freedom.
I myself was a hobo only of sorts, as you see, because I knew someday my literary efforts would be rewarded by social protection - I was not a real hobo with no hope ever except that secret eternal hope you get sleeping in empty boxcars flying up the Salinas Valley in hot January sunshine full of Golden Eternity toward San Jose where mean-looking old bo's 'll look at you from surly lips and offer you something to eat and a drink too - down by the tracks or in the Guadaloupe Creekbottom.
The original hobo dream was best expressed in a lovely little poem mentioned by Dwight Goddard on his Buddhist Bible:
Oh for this one rare occurrence
Gladly would I give ten thousand pieces of gold!
A hat is on my head, a bundle on my back,
And my staff, the refreshing breeze and the full moon.
[Picture of Jack found here.]
I grab my cart and a wipe
it's clean now and ready to knock
up and down the aisles, with its own
navigational system in that one front
wheel with the black plastic cover and
2 pounds of grocery store grime.
the beginning of my lesson today, breath.
I've come for stuff on the cheap,
lord knows I don't need to
I've come for something else too
Like an anthroplogist and a zen monk
i come to observe
us in a sea of stuff we want
I've come to give up certain parts of myself
the unskillful ways,
I've come to practice being us, nothing else.
the check-out line is the clencher,
the master has given me a pop-quiz.
What's wrong with right now?
I've been wanting to make (well eat, actually) this quiche since the magazine showed up last month. Got around to it last nite, nailed it pretty close the first time. I got 12 sheets of phyllo dough left, come on over for some pie!
Here's the latest stuff from your bobJuan.
one of the things I like most about fiction
often, there's sex.
the cat just walked in the house carrying half the yard in her tail.
If my bank closed, it's not like I'm out that much cash.
I'm here to tie your kangaroo down, Sport.
rules are for suckers
and I mean that in
the kindest of ways
we're only around for a few minutes
straighten up and fly right
off the map into the
madness of love
you're only one change away
from everything you really want
wantlessness
no, really
the hardest easiest thing
in the world
complete acceptance.
Now that I figured out I'm not gonna have a different life,
this one's it
there's no more waiting
what a relief
I'm all over this
all hell is breaking loose.
Damn this new PC.
I'm gonna have to teach Microsoft Office my language again. Custom.dic is up for a big lesson. I forgot to tell Cathy about Microsoft Office 2007 when we got this thing. I hope to not be around the first time she sees those ribbons!
Until next time.
La Curva. The only place for breakfast in Puerto Penasco (Rocky Point). We had a wonderful 2 days in Rocky Point. We haven't been going down much these past few years, last time was Eli & Amber's Wedding for me. It turns into an orgy of tortillas, salsa, frijoles, margaritas, burritos, naps, and all manners of hedonisms when I don't goes often enoughs. One big scrambling yeeehawww. Here's some Jack Kerouac on Mexico.
p. 21 - Lonesome Traveller. ... -- but the moment you cross the little wire gate and you're in Mexico, you feel like you just sneaked out of school when you told the teacher you were sick and she told you you could go home, 2 o'clock in the afternoon. -- You feel as though you just come home from Sunday morning church and you take off your suit and slip into your soft worn smooth cool overalls, to play -- .. It's a great feeling of entering the Pure Land, especially because it's so close to dry faced Arizona and Texas and all over the Southwest - but you can find it, this feeling, this fellaheen feeling about life, that timeless gayety of people not involved in great cultural and civilization issues .. Mexico is generally gentle and fine, even when you travel among the dangerous characters as I did -- "dangerous" in the sense we mean in America -- in fact the further you go away from the border, and deeper down, the finer it is, as though the influence of civilizations hung over the border like a cloud.
Now some bobJuan stuff:
From the dearly departed files: My friend Martha lost her husband Michael recently. All my precious thoughts and love for you and your family babes.
You have to read, as it turns out, to be well read.
From the news recently: Doctors said one man was bitten on the hand after trying to pet a snake. They said the man had been drinking prior to the incident. (I wish I had a dime for everytime...)
Quit resisting resistancelessness.
Why are matters of life and death always taken so seriously?
I've decided to put all my eggs in one basket.
How come there's so much bad information in my blood?
Makes me glad I declined the piss test.
Were the pandemics before television?
I am another bit of living proof, you can live totally happy on less than $100,000 a year.
And from some real people:
Self is realized through selflessness. Lao-Tsu.
Outside of poetry there is no Zen, outside of Zen there is no poetry. Ten'in Ryutaku.
That's it for this time.
We're back, stories to come. Beautiful beautiful beautiful. Stories to come. We didn't have any trouble with the flu or drug warfare.. Or so far, no other bugs from eating all local, all the time.
Ahhhh, I've finished another classic. I've got about 10 more waiting. I am so lucky I didn't go to college when I was young for I probably would have just rushed through this stuff! Just finished with Annie this morning. This is no page-turner, it' more like 15 magical mushroom trips. I needed breaks between hits. My friend YuYu turned me on to this book. I asked him if he remembered the part where Annie tells the story of folks who went through operations and gained their eyesight for the first time. This whole thing begins on page 27. He couldn't remember since it was probably back in the 70s when he started this thing. We all know he's slow, but this book demands slow. She cites work done by Marius von Senden in a book called Space and Sight. Amazon doesn't have it, it is old I guess. I'd love to read it. Anyway, it's the way Annie does it over and over again, exploring details and sharing them with us. Mind boggling enthralling detalia.
Annie was in her 20s when she wrote this book. Makes me wish I hadn't given my Thoreau to the Singleton Moms Rummage Sale. The comparison to Thoreau is cheap and already rudely common, a guy at a pond instead of a girl at a creek. I apologize Annie, I like yours better. I'm not sure Thoreau even talked about insects as parasites.
Annie didn't spend much time wondering about things, she found out. Then she put up her pallet and canvas and showed us what she learned and saw in graceful awe; close by the water over by the hill, down in the valley, covered in admiration and scars and dirt and blood and snow.
I'm no critic, who don't know that. I will say that Annie is the bravest writer I've read so far. To get this far in love with anything, and bold about it, makes me want to sharpen my pencil. She describes these bugs called striders (pp 191-192) and how they tear it up. She ends the piece by saying: Next time I will know what is happening, and if they want to play the last bloody act offstage, I will just part the curtain of grasses and hope I sleep through the night. Striders are brutal. Annie is questfully respectful.
Or, on p. 258: In another book I read the geologists think that Lake Superior marks the site of the highest mountain that ever existed on this continent. I don't know. I'd like to see it. Or I'd like to be it, to feel when to turn.
On Monarchs (p. 259..) This honeysuckle was an odor already only half-remembered, a breath of the summer past, the Lucas cliffs and overgrown fence by Tinker Creek, a drugged sweetness that had almost cloyed on those moisture-laden nights, scarcely known and mostly lost, and heading south. [what the hell is cloyed?] I walked him across the gas station lot and lowered him into a field. He took to the air, pulsing and gliding; he lighted on sassafras, and I lost him.
Some more love: I smelled silt on the wind, turkey, laundry, leaves . . . my God what a world. There is no accounting for one second of it.
One more: This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can't take it.
One very popular quote from this book she says was inspired by Thomas Merton, who is my guy on the Catholic Monk scene day-to-day. Thomas said There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statutes. Annie says famously: There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. ..... I won't have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus. There's even more in this quote (...) that you can find for yourself on page 274.
Her language is almost too much for the bobJuan. The subject matter and her love allowed me to keep up. She herself says in the Afterword: I'm afraid I suffered youth's drawback, too: a love for grand sentences, and fancied a grand sentence was not quite done until it was overdone. I'll allow her that for sure, on account of love.
I imagine if she had written this book a long time ago, it may have been included in the Holy Bible, a book on the absolute love and admiration and thankfulness for all God has created. The holiest of things. Maybe it would have been placed just after the Book of Psalms.
I will let the book rest for a while, but imagine it will come around again, on occasion, when I need another trip into the details from the creek.
As it turns out, there are cases of the flu here in Phoenix, but not Rocky Point. It's gotta be safer down there. Also, check out these stats.
Killed by Car Accidents Highway fatalities account for more than 94% of all transportation deaths. There were an estimated 6,289,000 car accidents in the US in 1999. There were about 3.4 million injuries and 41,611 people killed in auto accidents in 1999. The total number of people killed in highway crashes in 2001 was 42,116, compared to 41,945 in 2000. An average of 114 people die each day in car crashes in the U.S. more... and 1999 pdf... [PDF Document - 2.5M]Killed by the Common Flu
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that 35 to 50 million Americans come down with the flu during each flu season.The CDC estimates that in the US more than 100,000 people are hospitalized and more than 20,000 people die from the flu and its complications every year.
We'll probably go by train, or shuttle. Car's are dangerous.
