Band Names My Sons Are Considering

Grasswhistle
Alkali
The Enormous Radio
Guargum
Small Ships
Walking Paper Puppets
The Uncrackable Egg
Shoebox Guitar
Parental ESP

The Dream of Portalena (As Told by Grace to her Father)

March 26, 2010

I was wearing a dress I got for Christmas, but I wanted to wear boy clothes, so I dressed up as a boy farmer. All the girls thought I was a real boy so they wanted to follow me. They wanted to follow me because I was playing a game in Portalena. It wasn’t really a game it was just this group called Portalena. What people had to do was walk up to a random person and play “Head-to-Head Sky Diver.” In the game you had to talk or battle. If you talk you have to think of something really fast. The girls followed me because they wanted to play the talking game. I first talked with a girl who fell in love with someone. She talked for a really long time.

My costume had vampire teeth. A farmer boy with vampire teeth. One girl wanted to play “Head-to-Head Sky Diver.” The game can be dangerous. You can get stabbed or hurt, really, really hurt. You have to go up to a really high rock. There’s these balloons that can make you float, but you have to take off this thing that makes you float before you pass the balloon. But you can fall, and you have to dodge these rocks that can kill you.

In the dream, I always got smashed. I didn’t get smashed, but I almost got smashed, and I always win. It’s a really fun game, but it’s always harsh.

So, I played the game with the girls. Then the girls left, and I kept trying to find a robber who got loose. Intentionally, you can’t get someone. I never actually found her.

The police caught the robber eventually. They caught her in a crazy store. The crazy store was a free place where people could do whatever they want—they can rip anything apart, they can eat whatever they want, they can jump or talk however they want. That’s where the police found the robber.

The robber was just talking to a person, a person who didn’t know she was a robber. The man didn’t know because he was blind. The police came up from behind her, she didn’t see them coming. They came up from the other side where she wasn’t looking and grabbed her.

Eventually there’s this giant map where you can go to places. One of the scariest things was that I was in early Portalena and I fell into this hole, this was actually part of the game, but it was filled with spiders. There was this giant spider, it was a person dressed up as a spider, the person wouldn’t actually attack you, they just followed you.

So I jumped up and went out of the hole, and the spider didn’t follow me. I kept walking and I found Nate. Nate is one of my friends. He isn’t exactly my friend, but he’s famous, he’s famous because his dad makes comics of him. He kept following me wherever I went. That’s how we became friends.

Then, there was this giant shark in the water and I saw a Hang-Wa. A Hang-Wa is a different type of Indian. The difference is that a Hang-Wa doesn’t live in a place, they live in a type of house. A Hang-Wa wears different types of clothes than an Indian. The Hang-Wa gave me medicine. He gave me medicine because the shark, this special type of shark didn’t bite. Instead this type of shark gave out a kind of poison. The Hang-Wa gave me medicine because the shark had poisoned me.

Suddenly, the Hang-Wa started to speak. He said, “Aricho Hang-Wa!” This meant, “Welcome to our country.” This country was called “Tales.” And in this country there was a certain time machine. And so if you got a time machine you would have to go to a second level. You go to a different place every time. So I got in the time machine and went to the second level and I met an old grandma. [Don’t write this down because any grandma wouldn’t like to read this…they wouldn’t like being called an “old grandma.”]

The old grandma gave me something. She gave me a silver coin. And that silver coin, she said, was one of the most powerful coins in the whole world. It could grant you anything. It would help you when you meet a person who has sorrows. The coin would help them with all the things that they’re sad about.

Eventually, I found a little flower. A very sad flower. The flower was starting to wilt. So I gave it a toaster. The magic coin granted a toaster. Suddenly the toaster popped out something. It was something that no one could ever get. It was the most fantastic thing in the world. It was another flower! How sweet. Another, tiny flower. And that flower became friends with the sad flower, and the flower began to be happy.

Then I met a Portalena rock star. Her hair is blue mixed in with purple. Her shirt is red. Her vest is black. She has brown pants. She wears eye-liner. She held a rainbow guitar. She put on a show for me. After the show she talked to me. She asked me what kind of song I wanted her to do and what kind of thing I would want her to do. I asked if I could sleep over at her house. She said, “Yes.”

Her house had all these pictures of all of her fans and there was all of these guitars and candles and all these people kept coming over and there were velvet curtains and it was wonderful. We slept in bunk beds.

Then I woke up.

Excerpts From An Email Sent to My Supervisor Concerning A Meeting With A Spiritual Teacher

Extremely purple. Purple dress, purple sun hat, purple shawl, with a crystal necklace as big as your fist. It was everything I could do to not run screaming, "God help me!" We sat. She took out her book and handed it to me. The foreword is by Dr. Joyce Brothers.

There are celebrity endorsements. There is a gold award sticker on the lower right corner. It is a literary award I do not recognize.

She knows Desmond Tutu. Desmond Tutu has written the forewords to her next three books. These books remain unwritten.

She had a medical injury, lost the ability to walk and was housebound for 8 years. She disappeared from public life. She had a miraculous healing. A woman saw her energy paths then used her "glowing" hands to heal her. "It was like she had LED lights embedded in her palms. We only get a Seer like that once every thousand years. I was lucky to have met her. Of course, there is no luck." The Seer happened to be eating at the same restaurant. "This is not a coincidence."

Now upright she is preparing to re-enter "the world." She had a series of dreams about me. She is supposed to meet with me. That is what the meaning of the dreams. She says she knows how to help people in hell. She says she knows how to cultivate compassion in others. I did not know what to make of her. She spent a lot of time staring at me with an intentional "spiritual" gaze. She closed her eyes a lot and fell into silences...I felt like she was trying to show me her magic powers. I am immune to magic powers.

She understands all the energy meridians and has seen them glowing on people. She ordered double bacon on her Cobb salad. She told me stories of hanging out with Tutu. She drank beer with her salad. She touched my hand and tried to stare into my eyes while I chewed my hamburger. I intentionally allowed the ketchup and onions to drip from my mouth. I am not in the practice of returning spiritual gazes. She told me a baby at the next table was very attracted to her. She implied that the baby noticed her "energy," and was naturally attracted. When the baby crawled toward our table I made faces at the baby, causing the baby to come to me. I then gave her a look that said, "Now who has the baby power." She was impressed by this. I think she took it as a sign.

She says she is working with mathematicians to create formulas for grace, for example: "The grace you give to others is the grace you allow yourself. That is a mathematical truth."

The waiter asked to meet with her after lunch to talk about his divorce. She spent thirty minutes telling me her theory of resentment and how to heal it. The points of the teaching spell R.E.A.P. I hung a piece of lettuce from my beard while she told me the teaching. I did this to ward off her spell. It worked.

She told me her daughter died at a young age, caused by the arrogance of doctors. She told me she feels resentment 15 times a day and now heals it within minutes each time it arises. She told me it's like knowing how to drive home.

She told me she once watched Desmond go from hatred to compassion in 30 seconds.

She wants to meet with Frank. I want Frank to meet with her...particularly during a time when I am not available.

I don't know what to make of any of this. I am sending the lunch check to you for reimbursement.

Some Possible Tarot Cards

The Bibliomancer
The Totally Awesome Boots
The Trained Bear
Last Chance for Gas
What is Unprovable
The Abandoned Well
Leonard Nimoy
The Ad Man
The Personal Best
The Non-Apology
A Familiar Snowflake
Fatigue
The Indelible Yen
The Man with a Theory
The False Memory
The Stutterer
The Distance Swimmer
Competence
Love as an Adjective
Lady Lazarus
The Map of Sand
Awakened by Touch
Smile Lines
Rye Whiskey
The Personal Shopper
The Mount of Olives
Who Would Notice?
The Doormat
Gotcher Nose
The Toe Ring
The Hep Cat
He Was Always Kind to Me
The Three-Legged Mutt
The Smell of Spring
The Ugly Poet
The Bullet Lodged Near the Heart
The Trivial Mistake
Say It!
Those Bastards
It Would Probably Be a Good Idea
The Charlatan
Calloused Hands
Ease

Girl and the Bear Part 4

One night, before mother had left them, a bear had come to their cabin. She remembered hearing her father yelling and the sound of breaking branches. Her mother had screamed, “Harley! Harley what is it!” Mother had pulled Grace into bed and flung a blanket over their heads. “Is it robbers?” She had asked, terrified. Her mother just held her tight and shook her head, “I don’t know…but I can’t take this much longer.” Later it quieted and her father had come in, lit the lamp, and then laughed at the two of them, clinging to each other beneath the blankets. “Boo!” he yelled, slapping his hands on the bed. They both screamed then her mother just fell apart--she wept at Grace's side with hair and hands twisted across her eyes. Her father looked pained when he pulled the blanket back, “It was just a bear dear. A harmless black bear. It was just as frightened as you.”

***

“Howdy,” a man in a green cap and matching green coat sauntered up from the park store. “How are you two this morning?”

“Fine,” her father replied. “We came to see the bear.”“Good for you! Did you camp here last night?”

“No, we’re local. Just over in Wagner creek.”

“Okay, then.” The man replied within genuine warmth, then kneeling beside Grace he said, “You ever seen a real bear?” Grace shook her head. “Well, whaddya think?”

Grace shrugged her shoulders. “He seems sad.”

The man laughed, “Sad? Naw! This bear’s as happy as can be. He gets plenty of food, lots of treats, and lots of admirers. No. I’d say this is the happiest bear you’ll ever meet.” The man winked at her father, patted her on the head, then stood up and left her to her own thoughts. “So. Wagner creek? You got fruit trees?”

She listened for a moment while her father told the story of the peaches he’d brought from Ohio and the damage they suffered and the difficult winter. Soon her attention turned back to the bear who was now on all four legs and turned so that its brown eyes met hers. She looked and noticed a thick shackle around one of its hind legs. The black iron band had worn the hair just above the bear’s ankle exposing a halo of smooth, pink, skin--like a human being. She looked up, and again the bear met her eyes and she felt immediately that the ranger was lying. This bear was sad. Deeply sad. She looked and looked and the bear looked back until both girl and bear were caught in each other’s gaze--Grace jumped when her father tapped her on the shoulder.

“Grace, we’re going over to look at a map. You want to come with me?” Grace shook her head. “Alright then. Don’t cross that rope line.” Her father reached into his pocket and pulled out the golden pear. “Here. Go ahead and eat this. I’ll be back in a moment.” Grace took the pear and held it up to her mouth. It smelled like leather and clover. She remembered the fall, when her father would bring home pears and her mother would bake them with butter and cinnamon.

She pressed the pear to her mouth when she suddenly noticed the bear standing, standing on its hind legs, standing with a front leg held out. For a timeless moment the bear stood, and the girl stood, looking at one another--the bear with its front leg outstretched, the girl with the pear to her lips, frozen in wonder at the upright beast. They stood and stared and stood and stared, each as silent as the pines. Then, without thinking, Grace stepped passed the rope, walked slowly toward the wild animal, and carefully set the pear onto its sharp, outstretched paw. The bear took the gift, lifted it to its mouth, and swallowed it with one wet swallow. It descended to four legs then stretched its big black snout until it reached Grace’s ear. Grace felt a hot billow of air across her cheek and then heard--heard in the deepest of voices, “Help me.”

Grace stepped back and looked at the large head, the fanged mouth, the redwood eyes, her whole body burning with wonder. There was a scream. A woman was screaming and pointing from somewhere in the trees, “Help! Help!” Grace looked intently at the woman trying to see what was troubling her, when she suddenly heard her father cry out in fear, “Grace! Grace! Get away from there! Run! Run!” A large rock flew through the air and struck the bear’s shoulder with a dull thud. The bear’s head jerked back, it bared its teeth and growled at the park ranger who now stood waving his arms, shouting for the bear’s attention at the roped perimeter. Then Grace felt her father’s arms knock violently against her waist as she was pulled from the ground. There were two men and a group of boys running toward them, rocks and sticks in their hands as her father scampered beneath the rope barrier. She heard the bear’s chain rattle taught as it pulled toward the human beings, growling and swinging its arms in helpless anger.

Song about Making a Flag, Part of the Refrain of Which is Lifted from an Unfinished Sailor's Song in Moby-Dick

I wanted to make me a flag from the first row of wagons,
to make me a flag from the line of a keel.
I cut Jefferson stars and started to hang them
in the dark of a night I thought we'd never fill.

So good night and farewell, ye sweet Tennessee ladies,
good night and farewell, ye sweet ladies of Maine.
We must do what we want while we can
so when morning comes down
we can do what we must once again.

But I made me a flag from the streaked cheeks of children,
I made me a flag from the welts off a slave,
I made stars from the eyes of the dead and the nights
of the men that killed them made thread black as the grave.

So good night and farewell...

Pour me a drink of the distance and silence
you find at first light on American roads.
Sit with me a while, 'cause this love and this violence
I cannot understand them and they're all I know.

My grandfather he made a flag out of Westward,
my father he made him a flag out of Stone,
and I don't have a flag, but I would leave my daughters
stars and stripes broad and bright enough to make a home.

So goodnight and farewell, ye sweet Tennessee ladies,
good night and farewell, ye sweet ladies of Maine.
We must do what we want while we can
so when morning comes down
we can do what we must once again.

Why All This Travelling?

My father-in-law has a colleague of many years named Kai Woehler, a German immigrant who came to the States in the early 60's and began to teach physics for the U.S. Navy in Monterey, California. He had been one of the last students of Heisenberg, and fallen heir to Heisenberg's dream of a unified field theory--which if I get it, is at once an understanding of the most fundamental particles (movements?) of Being and something like the meaning of Being. Something that you could point to and in some sense say, that's the gist of it, right there. Woehler is also a traveler to remote, dangerous places--through the Taklamakan Desert along the Silk Road, to Svalbard, to the Skeleton Coast in Namibia. The impulse to find the basic particle of Being--he himself capitalizes It--and the impulse to travel to places that are nearly unreachable and that mark the end of something, that cannot be gone beyond, seem related somehow. So, busy life. And he has lunch with my father-in-law, whom I adore, on the third Thursday of the month, I think it is.

Now presumably, if you saw the smallest possible particle it wouldn't look like much. The point, in fact, is to edge as near as possible to nothing, to approach the instant of Becoming. And maybe you would see how the finger print of Being is scrimshawed, how the iris and the vocal chords are tuned to the particular pitch of something unrepeatable. But there is a logical problem, or at least a sticking point, with looking for meaning in matter. Even the most fundamental stuff is just stuff, even if it is the stuff we're made of. There is a question for me of whether it's the answer or the question that we worship at the shrine of philosophy or science. I think I know the answer but I don't like it. I think maybe, looking at the fundamental particle or movement, what you would see, if you were a cosmologist and a searcher, would be as much as anything the road approaching this particle. The effort and tedium and longing, the dead ends at which beloved friends and revered elders had gotten stuck, the luck of arriving alive.

Lunch may hold as much transcendental meaning as anything else. Kai Woehler and my father-in-law were once discussing the moment of death. They were trying to imagine the fear and pain of death, and considering whether the moment of death were somehow the best seat in the House of Being or just the Edge of the Dumpster. And Kai said confidently that he would take his chances with the pain and disappointment, that he wanted no anaesthetics. That in some sense this was the great adventure and he wanted to arrive at the much anticipated destination with a clear head. I like this. Of course, again, it's just death. Not logically any more the source of religious meaning than my first cup of coffee this morning. And yet I suspect that somehow the end of my first cup of coffee, the firstness of the cup itself even, has to do with death. That death is the end towards which all Being and all consciousness of Being moves. And likewise, I can't help believing--even as I lose belief in nearly everything else--that the basic patterns of Being are the basic patterns of consciousness: planning and doing, waiting and missing, longing and relinquishment.

I need to think about death again. Not this time as the end of personality and personal accomplishments, of being seen and loved. Or, okay, maybe a bit. But more than that, I need to know whether I can believe that death is good. Walt Whitman, after seeing plenty of it in the Civil War hospitals of Washington D.C., summoned his clearest voice and called to it, sang to it:

Come, lovely and soothing Death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later, delicate Death.
Prais’d be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious;
And for love, sweet love—But praise! praise! praise!
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding Death.
Dark Mother, always gliding near, with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?
Then I chant it for thee—I glorify thee above all;
I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.

It is easy in dark, exhausted moods to--theoretically--welcome ones own death. It costs no more than the welcoming of other ultimates--Love or God or even Independent Wealth. Ones own death, or the thought of it anyway, wipes the board clean. Unless one has the bigness of heart to imagine leaving other people behind, leaving behind a world that continues to need and break. But the occasion of this hymn to death was the disastrous, faith-shaking loss of Lincoln, two years into an endless war that was killing not only brothers but belief. For Whitman, Lincoln was "the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands," as he says at the close of "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," his consideration of Lincoln's death and of his body's long recessional by train across the country back to the earth of Illinois.

So I'm wondering whether death is good, and I don't even know how to ask yet. But I'm thinking that in all sorts of ways that I'm only starting to see, mine is an American life. That is, I'm deeply situated in this land and this history, this particular love and violence. And so in some way mine will be an American death. And even the great American hymn of death, Whitman's great discursive twilit talk of death-longing, is a road story--a movie in which it feels like something worthwhile or real happens because of the sheer fact of movement towards a destination. Or is it just movement through the swamps and plains of the land? Or even awareness of the land spreading out around you? And if you're a Westerner then you have to add to catalog of the land deserts, forests and mountains, and the ever-present fact of distance, and the Pacific beyond them all. Clearly the land is itself a story. I get to be in it until I die and then, even, I suppose, all my tendencies will carry on in the land. It's after 4AM now, and I'm ending this not because I've gotten anywhere but just because I'm grateful to be tired. I'm going to practice believing that death is good.