Category: Life

Write what you know.

What do I know? I thought I knew stuff. I guess there are gray areas, outcomes that I can’t predict, but the sun comes up every morning, doesn’t it? I know I saw it this morning.

Somehow I had slept through the sound of the jets that take off over my house, starting at 7 AM every day. Seven years I’ve been here. Seven in the morning, seven days a week. I rarely sleep past seven. Today I stayed in my dream world until 8:15, and woke disoriented, the sun too high, angles and shadows wrong.

I sat up in bed and the dreams ran off my body like ocean water, trickling and evaporating as I emerged into my dry and sunny bedroom. I sit on the edge of the bed and think about my dreams for a few seconds, those crazy little shows I stage for myself. There are only those few seconds when I am awake but still can see the visions of sleep. When I am awake, things intrude. They might be things from the real world, but I don’t know. Once disturbed, the images ripple and vanish as if they are painted on the surface of a glassy pool, into which a pebble has fallen.

Molly the Cat is outside the bedroom door, and she is telling me that breakfast is overdue, and all my dreams are gone. Luckily, I don’t have to go to work today.

While the coffee heats I get Molly’s morning meal for her. This is one thing I know: If you delay, Molly the Cat will bite your ankles. Not enough to draw blood or cripple you, but enough so that you don’t forget your duty. I’m a night person, not very efficient first thing in the morning, and so I have a lot of tiny little scars on my ankles, from seven years of bites.

I know that freshly ground Colombian coffee beans make a fine brown drink. I know that autumn follows summer, shadows grow long and we slide into cold days. I know that no digital device will ever sound as good as a Strat plugged straight into an old Fender tube amp, and I mean to prove that a few more times before it’s over.

Some of my old bloggin’ buddies have gone over to MySpace.com,

which I kind of think of as The Dark Side. You know who you are, and I just want to extend a friendly caution to you about your new home on the web:

You may think you’re just fooling around, making “friends,” but some people take things a lot more seriously. If the wrong people see your site you might find yourself on the totally wrong kind of hitlist.

Just sayin’.

If the Big Party had not already been an annual event I might have had to throw a bash anyway.

My life isn’t so tough, but sometimes I do feel like it’s pushing against me, like Bill Russell when you’ve got the ball and you’re trying to back into the low post and the closer you get to the key the harder the pressure on your back and you know it’s wrong, it’s against the rules, he can’t ride you like that, but he’s Bill Russell and you’re nobody and the official is looking the other way, and he always will be. You know if you turn and shoot Russell will be all over you, one hand in your eyes, the other stuffing your shot back at you, if he doesn’t just take it away from you and fire it downcourt while the crowd jumps screaming to its feet and there you’ll be standing, your hopes dashed as the game goes on without you so you might as well just hit the showers because neither Bill Russell nor Life will care.

Times like this, you need a road trip. Or a party.

Anyway, The 2006 Labor Day Barbecue and Jam Session was a huge bash, a big success. As with any really good party, the chaos began almost immediately at 2:00 PM, and by three o’clock it was officially no longer my party. Oh, sure it would be me who had to speak to the authorities if they showed up later, and yeah, I tried to act like a host and introduce everybody to everybody, but the gathering had taken on a life of its own and I was only a happy spectator for much of the day.

The Flippin’ Birds showed up from San Pedro…

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…some old guys were there…

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…and some young girls.

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I got to sing with my brother…

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…and play bass in a blues band…

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…while a lawyer grilled burgers…

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…for the assembled multitude:

The music rocked for eight hours, I made some new friends (hey, Lori!) and saw some old ones, all the neighbors came (and dug it), the drunks all got rides home, the police never showed, we said a rowdy goodbye to the summer of 2006 and a reverent greeting to the fall, and I was safe in bed by 3:00 AM.

Any questions?

Here’s the scoop on the big party.

We kept revising the guest list. Not deciding who to invite, but trying to figure out out who was going to show up. It seemed that every day in the weeks leading up to the end of summer, someone would confirm, someone would drop out and someone else would ask to bring a bunch of friends. The scientist would be out of town, presumably attending a conference of scientists, but his wife might make it, if she could get a ride from their home a hundred miles up the coast. A high percentage of invitees weren’t responding at all, leaving us wondering just how much potato salad we would need. Then there was the fresh, still-bleeding marital breakup in the extended family, and it wasn’t likely that both sides of that would want to be together, but which side would blink? We didn’t know.

Trying to sort out the variables and come up with a head count, we began to wonder if we hadn’t been at it too long, if our annual “Goodbye to Summer” back yard affair hadn’t run it’s course. Mrs. Jones said “I don’t want people coming here because they think they have to.”

An unsettling thought, but it was too late to cancel. We may not know who was coming and who they’d bring, but we had to get ready for it anyway.

I made a spreadsheet. And yes, I know I’m a dork.

A column of names, and more columns to check off if they’d been invited yet, whether they had responded, if their answer was yes or no. To cover all eventualities, there were columns for the non-respondents, showing the minimum and maximum guests they represented should they decide at the last minute to make an appearance, and should they bring their cousin’s family who happened to be visiting from Minnesota. We revised the list as new data presented itself each day, and formulae at the bottom gave us totals: The absolute minimum number of guests, a total of the “possibles,” and the Big Number – What would happen if absolutely everybody decided to join us.

These numbers varied wildly, but one day the Big Number hit 87. “That’s it,” said Mrs. Jones. “We’re never doing this again.” Eighty-seven guests might seem like a small gathering to some, but it looked like a pretty big crowd to us, especially since we had no clear idea if they were really all coming, or if maybe only ten of them would. Mrs. Jones started thinking about renting portable outhouses. Eighty-seven people could seriously mess with the nest.

Other days, after receiving regrets from one or two friends, we’d be thinking that no one was coming. We put off shopping for party food and supplies until the last minute, but lots of preparations had to be done no matter how large or small the group. There was a lot of gardening, because our regular guy who mows and edges just… disappeared, about a month earlier. We kept giving him the benefit of the doubt, like maybe we didn’t get his note that he was going on vacation, but we finally decided he had abandoned his post. We replaced him, and with just one day to spare the knee-high grass was cut and we were able to wade in and clean up the hedges and flower beds.

We also strung many Christmas lights in the Cheremoya tree and around the eaves of the garage, and I dug out a string I’d bought a year ago that has 15 tiny clear lights with little bamboo shades on each one! The patio floodlights were replaced by 25-watt “party lights.” (That’s what it said on the package, so how could I go wrong?) One thing I learned from my days of playing in bars is dim the lights! The place’ll look better, and so will the customers.

We borrowed twenty chairs from the owner of an out-of-business sushi restaurant (to add to the ten we had in the garage), built a backyard bandstand for the expected musicians (can’t have them setting up equipment in the damp, uneven grass) and rigged 540.5 square feet of canopy over the yard and the bandstand, to protect our honored guests from the baking afternoon sun. I had recently bought a share of a PA system, so I put together a rockin’ playlist on my mp3 player and figured out how to play it through the system.

To make sure the jam session got off to a good start, I put together a single-purpose, one-time-only band, and we worked out a set of material. We had five or six rehearsals, and we got just tight enough to fool most people.

The menu was going to be simple: Burgers (and cheeseburgers) for most people, grilled outdoors, of course. Turkey burgers, for the non-red meat eaters and for the purists, sauteed veggies (red, yellow and green peppers and sliced zucchini and onions, in olive oil). We found a bunch of oddball snack stuff at Trader Joe’s – rice sesame sticks with and without spicy Chinese flavors in them, and a variety of crackers. The one rule we observed was NO CHIPS.

My heart has been heavy lately. I have felt helpless and adrift for a couple of months now, no longer in control, or even in the loop. I always thought, or at least hoped, that things were getting better, people were getting better, and I would some day leave a world at peace, full of people who wanted to help each other, who were not hungry and angry and reliving endlessly their childish vengeances. I guess I was wrong. Maybe all I can do is draw my friends and family to me as tightly as they will let me, feed them and sing to them, laugh with them, hold them and love them. I will kiss all the girls and some of the boys, and I will never grow so old again.

More on the party tomorrow.

My computer broke and I stopped writing this blog.

It took almost a week to fix my machine. Maybe that was because I did it myself, but I had to do it myself because I thought it was too important to leave to a technician.

Maybe it was because my job has morphed into a daily descent to hell and I am still on fire by the time I get home each night.

I wrote one post from a different location, but it was lame. You can see for yourself. It didn’t feel right, and I saw myself behind the curtain, trying to seem clever and important, which I don’t feel any more.

I found myself cringing at the daily news. Could these outrages really be happening? I stopped listening.

I stopped reading my favorite blogs, because I couldn’t concentrate on them. Or maybe I just thought I wouldn’t be able to think of clever enough comments, that would make me seem mysterious and witty and prescient, or something. I watched the number of unread posts climb. After a little more than a week, there are hundreds. I’m hopelessly behind, and I feel bad about it. I’ve made friends, and now I am leaving them.

I feel gray. The anniversary of Hurricane Katrina reminds me that we have lost a city, while Nero fiddled. New Orleans, that magical city, hasn’t recovered, and neither have I. The venality and corruption of the people I work with and the politicians who “lead” us are so close to the surface these days that I expect the pustules to burst any minute. My pathetic political rants are juvenile, boring and useless. We don’t live under a right-wing dicatorship, but the similarities are scary, and I am helpless to persuade.

I’m planning to have fifty or so real-life people over for a Labor Day barbecue and jam session (Email me if you want to come. My email address is on the “About Jones” page. It’s this Sunday – sorry for the short notice.). I’m cleaning up the back yard, planning food, stringing lights in trees, fixing some plumbing, building a bandstand, inviting folks, circling the wagons.

I’m playing guitar again, and this time I don’t ever want to stop. My chops are coming back. My left-hand fingertips have grown hard callouses. This may seem creepy to you, but it is the guitarist’s badge, proof that you really play, armor against wimping out in pain after only an hour or so. When the last song is played, sometime after midnight, it’ll be played by me.

Real life. Real fun. People I can’t fool. No talk of Jonbenet or IED’s manufactured in Iran to exacting specifications.

I’ll write when I can.

I heard somewhere that cats only learn to meow so they can communicate with humans.

Thanks for the advice on what to do about the cute little visiting cat in my back yard. You can find most of the story here. To recap the advice I got:

Most of you thought I should go on feeding Tigger, but deny it to his owners down the block. Certainly, when Tigger still doesn’t want to hang out at their house – where he actually lives – they will be suspicious, and surely there will be a confrontation and a questioning. Can I lie about this convincingly? I don’t know.

A small but significant minority felt that we should just adopt Tigger – or as some put it, accept the fact that he has already adopted us. I have to say that my heart leans in this direction. But there are two elements to my dilemna that I didn’t mention in the original post.

One is that Mrs. Jones is highly sensitive to stinky cat-pee odors, and a new cat in the family could incite a smelly turf battle. It may be true that the anticipation is worse than the actual occurrence, but she has said she would have to move out if Tigger or Molly the Cat started with the territorial marking in or about the house. I don’t know how to factor this in to our decision, because, for one thing, I don’t know if either of them would do their stinky little spraying, and if they did, how hard would it be to neutralize the smell, and would Mrs. Jones really move out? Still. Let it suffice to say that I would rather lose both cats than Mrs. Jones.

The other element is that there is a little girl involved. We don’t really know these particular neighbors, and it wasn’t until yesterday that I realized that the pudgy ten-year-old wannabe cheerleader I have seen around is their daughter. So “adopting” Tigger becomes more problematic, regardless of whether he has adopted us, or if our neighbors are glad to get rid of him, or anything else. I couldn’t take away a little girl’s kitty. Mind you, I haven’t asked her if it would be OK, but need I dramatize for you what that conversation would be like? I didn’t think so.

So for the time being I am honoring my neighbors’ wishes and not feeding Tigger. As shown in the picture above, he is still hanging out at our back door (coincidentally, it’s the kitchen door). Going on Day 5 of Tigger-betrayal, and he is learning a whole meowing vocabulary. He can now say “I thought you guys were my friends!” And “I am very hungry!” And yes, these are always exclamatory sentences.

With the various complications, together with the fact that Tigger likes us, he really likes us, I don’t think this will get resolved amicably or honestly any time soon. I may not be able to let him join our little family full-time, but if I see that he is losing weight or getting sick or just not thriving, I’ll begin “Operation Feed-and-Deny.”

I’m hoping for a sign that will tell me what to do.

Fair warning: If you don’t want to read a cat post, turn back now.

Meet Tigger:

Tigger is a frequent visitor to the backyard lately, somewhat to the chagrin of the resident queen, Molly the Cat:

Tigger is outgoing, inquisitive, trusting and playful. He likes to par-tay. Molly, on the other hand, is reserved. Her idea of a good time is hiding in a bush, spying on the backyard. She can do this all day, even if nobody’s there.

We have a dilemna. Tigger doesn’t live here. Tigger isn’t our cat. But Tigger never goes home.

Home is two doors down. We don’t really know the people who live there, but once when Tigger got trapped in our house by a door that blew shut, I caught him and read his little tag. “Tigger,” it said, and there was a phone number.

We called the number, because Tigger was acting like a lost cat, and we thought we’d try to help, and that’s how we found out he lived so close. The woman who answered was not concerned about the little guy, and indeed had not been missing him. She even volunteered that her husband didn’t like Tigger. Seems his heart had been stolen by a black cat who had recently died a violent traffic-related death. She told us that Tigger was not cuddly. Didn’t like people. Couldn’t stand to be picked up or petted. Always ran when he saw people coming.

We were pretty surprised, because this was exactly the opposite of what we saw. He loved to be with people, couldn’t get enough petting, always wanted to play. And he’s the cutest darned thing. At first he had dry, brittle fur, and he scratched a lot, even though he didn’t have fleas. And when the lady on the phone told us he was a year old, we were horrified, because he was the size of a six-month-old kitten. We discovered that Tigger had a brother, Bootsie, who was the alpha cat and ate most of the food. These are stupid names, aren’t they? I had nothing to do with them.

So we fed him. Not much at first, just a few bites here and there, but good quality stuff. Anyone who’s ever fed a stray cat knows where this is going, and over the course of six weeks, that’s exactly where it went. Tigger hung around more and more, and eventually he had a feeding schedule, just like Molly the Cat, although Tigger never gets to come in the house, which pleases M and frustrates T.

He thrived on the food (and attention) he got from us. His coat got shiny and luxuriant, and he gained a couple of pounds. Every now and then Bootsie would show up. Tigger obviously idolizes his big brother, but even in our yard Bootsie eats all the food, and Tigger quietly defers. In fact, it was after watching this deference once that I started feeding Tigger regular meals. I figured he just couldn’t get close enough to the food back home.

But today Miss B (Mrs. Jones) had another talk with the lady two doors down. She came looking for Tigger, and she found him at our house. She said she hadn’t seen him for two weeks.

Two weeks! Molly the Cat was a raggedy unattractive little stray when she came to us seven years ago, and to this day she’s kind of ornery and bitey, but if she went missing even for one day I would be all over the neighborhood looking for her. Molly the Cat is in the house for bed every night or I am out searching until I find her. And these people can ignore such a cutie-pie for two weeks?

Miss B and I have concluded that these people are not good cat stewards. They have a bad attitude toward Tigger, they don’t really know him at all, they don’t seem to be feeding him very well (witness his new shiny coat) and it took them two weeks to come looking for him.

And now they’d like us to stop feeding him, so he will stop coming to visit. Personally, I suspect he’ll continue to visit no matter what we do. He visited for weeks before we ever gave him a snack. But, hoo boy it will be hard to stop feeding him, now that he has come to expect it. He will give me that expectant look, and he won’t know what’s going on when I fail to come across with the goodies.

Our neighbor has hinted that if we like him so much maybe we should just keep him. But what about Molly the Cat? She hates him (she hates all visitors, human and animal), and she precipitates daily screaming confrontations with him (even though he is only mildly interested in her – they are both fixed). Then there’s the issue of Tigger’s big brother, playmate and role model, Bootsie. Would it be right to separate them? Plus, you know it’s easy to shoot off your mouth and say “Why don’t you just take him?” but if we said “Yeah, we want him,” I don’t know how she would react.

Tonight’s the first night in a month that Tigger won’t get any food here. He’s lounging on the back stoop right now, waiting for a late-night snack. Instead he will get a door closed gently in his face. I’ll try to comply with his owner’s wishes, but if I see him getting scrawny again, and his fur turning scruffy and scratchy, I don’t know how I’ll take it.

What do you think I should do? Cut off all food? Claim him as ours? Buy an RV and hit the road for two years? Or feed him surreptitiously, all the while claiming I am not feeding him?

Just a few quick words for my friends in the midwest:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Today in Southern California was the first day in a couple of weeks that the temperature was normal, sort of. In my town it hit 81 degrees, and now, late at night, it’s only 66, truly a California balmy night after a mostly triple-digit July.

So eat your hearts out Bismarck, Iowa City, Champaign, Chicago, Minneapolis, Cleveland and the rest of you. You know who you are. I’ve heard the worldwide heat wave has come to your town now. If you need to lose weight, just mow the lawn. That should be good for a ten or fifteen pound reduction.

Oh, and you poor people – better stay under the bridge if you want to maintain that alabaster skin. Also, it’s cooler there.

If you live in the Northeast (according to my weather girl on KCAL 9), get ready: you’re next.

I pretty much can’t stand to hear any more about the Israeli-Hezbollah brouhaha.

I think the thing to do now is to encourage them to fight it out to the finish, but make ’em use only weapons they built themselves. No F-16’s, no katyusha rockets, no M-16’s or Kalashnikov rifles, and definitely no cluster bombs. That would leave just Uzi’s and car bombs, so the combatants would have to walk or drive right up to each other. My hope is that at close proximity they’d recognize their common humanity, lay down their arms and go to Starbucks for lattes (decaf for the Muslims, of course).

What is wrong with those people having a war in the desert, ten days into a worldwide heat wave? Isn’t it bad enough just living in the desert? And hey – worldwide heat wave? Didn’t we just have one of those a couple of years ago? Killed all those elderly French people? I bet they’ve got air conditioners over there this year (French readers, please let me know. So I won’t worry.). Too bad the cows in Fresno don’t have AC in the barn.

Locally, due to the worldwide heat wave, I nearly had an underpants crisis. Shocking, I know, but it’s a dangerous world, and I live very near the edge of it. It’s been so f*cking hot in my town for the past two weeks that I’ve had a few multiple shower days. I’d get all sweaty reading blogs or washing the car, then I’d cool off by taking a nice refreshing shower. After that, who wants to put on the sweat-drenched previously-worn boxer briefs, even if I’d only been wearing them for twenty minutes? Not me, let me tell you, so I’d have to get a fresh pair out of the drawer cuz there’s no way I’m going without, damn the consequences.

Boxer briefs are the perfect undergarment for me. I can’t make up my mind about anything: Hunter or vegan? Musician or wage slave? Mozart or Beethoven? PC or Mac? Boxers or briefs? I don’t know how long the boxer brief has been around, but I made the switch this year. Committed fully to them. Hybrid underpants. Snug like briefs, long like boxers. Sure, they look ridiculous, but no more than like bicycle pants, and those are worn right out on the street. The important thing is I didn’t have to decide which way to go. Boxer briefs. The best – and worst – of both worlds.

And under ordinary weather conditions I have enough boxer briefs to get me from laundry day to laundry day. One a day is usually enough, since I almost never have those embarrassing “accidents” any more. But what with the frequent bathing (because of the worldwide heat wave) it was touch and go near the end of the current laundry cycle and it looked for a while like I might have to go back to those shiny acrylic bikinis I got during the Reagan administration. I don’t mind saying I was down to one shower a day there for the last few days.

But you’ll be happy to know that I made it, and all is well now. I had to remain perfectly motionless for the past 48 hours, but I again have a drawer full of fresh, fluffy folded underpants, so when you see me, you will know that I am modestly but stylishly underclothed.

Speaking of underclothed, here’s a story about the latest way to beat the worldwide heat wave: Tubing on the river, with strippers! I especially like the city councilman who is worried because, he says, they “…are trained to take off their clothes.” Hooah.

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*Yes, I am f*cking censoring myself, bcause it turns out that words may have powers of their own, and you can’t be too careful.

This is not really writing.

It’s only typing. Actual writing does not seem to be a possibility for me lately. I’m distracted by everything. Maybe there is too much information about the world available to me, but I am frazzled thinking about all the things that seem to be going wrong.

Like that multi-train bomb attack in Mumbai. When did it stop being Bombay, anyway? And when did it become accepted procedure to make your political point by indiscriminately killing and maiming unarmed civilians who don’t even know what you want and are not involved in preventing you from getting it? I can’t face the story. Are the bombers proud of themselves? What kind of asshole would be high-fiving back at the secret headquarters over such a brutal and outright chickenshit act? I can’t hear this news. My mind freezes when I think about it, and I can’t even recall if I’ve heard what it is that the bombers say they want, or what they are protesting, or if they’ve spoken up at all.

And what about the Supreme Court saying that the U.S. government has to treat all prisoners humanely, according to the Geneva Convention? What the walking fuck is that all about? I’ve been a loser in my political hopes and dreams for so long that I can’t believe my side – the good guys – seem to have come out on top of this one. It’s only a tiny skirmish, sure, but it seems to be for real: The Supreme Court! Still, I am mistrustful. Maybe it’s some kind of a trick, something Karl Rove dreamed up in cahoots with Chief Justice Roberts over cognac and cigars in the back room of an exclusive Virginia bistro, alone in the dark with the curtains drawn, under high security. Something that can be used as an OctoberSurprise to turn the midterm election around and increase the Republican majority in Congress. I am circling this story like a coyote in a hungry, suspicious pack, not sure if the wounded prey might still be strong enough to defend itself, or if it’s time to eat. Is this the beginning of the fall of the neocon takeover, or just a kooky anomaly? I shouldn’t be thinking this way, but I am muddled.

And I don’t care about the three Israeli soldiers who were kidnapped, any more than I give a shit about whether or not Israel is “overreacting” in it’s response. I feel only despair when I see this new violence taking place, and it doesn’t matter who is bombing whom. It just makes me think that there will never be an end to this crap, no matter how we pray, no matter how many world leaders act like they hate war. This particular conflagration is based, somewhere way back in time, on religious animosity, as so many wars are. You can talk about your political alliances and why Iran or Syria might be getting somethng out of this, or why doesn’t the Lebanese government rein in Hizbollah, or can’t the UN do something, but the bottom line seems to be that Muslims hate Jews. Maybe Jews hate Muslims, too. I know that’s not politically correct to speculate about, so fucking picket my house if you want to. I’ll bet Jews are capable of stupid, blind, murderous hatred just like the rest of us. My brain won’t track this story, either. Wait: Are we in Northern Ireland? Vietnam? Indonesia? Chad? Iraq? Somalia? If it’s Sunday there must be mindless bloodshed somewhere.

My job, and thus my life, has turned to shit. I can’t ignore it any more, which is something I used to be able to do. Really, of all the things I can’t write about, I probably could write best about this subject, but I am too identifiable on this blog, and the things I would say about my company would be offensive to my superiors and coworkers alike, and I would either get beaten up or fired, probably both. So I’ll have to find a different venue for that particular rant, and probably my supportive friends will never see it.

So I have gone in with another guy (my brother) and bought a PA system, and I am getting together on Saturday afternoons with some other players in my living room and I am taking out my frustrations on my guitar. So far we have jammed on the three hottest Saturdays of the year, and my house is not air conditioned. But it’s the only therapy I know how to do on myself.

I hope it works.