10/3/17

I am home today, after two days of driving. Came back a little water logged and stiff, but this morning I’m already feeling better.  A morning walk with my brother and bone broth help. Just being in my bed helps. I have lived in this house now for twenty-eight years, and after spending most of my younger life house and place hopping, I seem to have grown roots in this fractured limestone soil.  Though understand, I could easily see myself living next to the Pacific Ocean.

Got five poems rejected this morning.  Assholes, he mutters. Philistines. Barbarian hoard. May someone piss in you boots. And other assorted curses. Though one is supposed to be above all that—it isn’t personal, just business—or taste. Assholes, he mutters again.

Alan writes that poets are like that infinite number of monkeys, plucking away at the infinite number of typewriters, and somewhere in there is the poem that will stop mass killings and other assorted acts of mayhem—somewhere in the infinite combination of words, which are only words, sounds whispered during a hurricane. NUB reminds everyone that he doesn’t write on a typewriter—no one does anymore.  Hell, I don’t think they make them anymore. But NUB writes with pen on notebook paper in some American coffee shop, hoping that the state police or national guard will come arrest him for finally finding the right combination of ink stains. We are trying to tell you—the poet screams, but no one hears him—her. No one is even listening.

I was going to mow the grass, but it’s starting to rain.  I was going to burn the brush, but it’s starting to rain. There’s baggage to unpack, food to buy, bone broth to make, Kombucha to brew—

Truth is, I haven’t written a decent poem since I got sick, or whatever it is I am—inflammation, a loss or red blood cells—the creeping mortality of it all. Concentration slips away—that ability to let the sound float near the top of your head. 

Driving home through the west Texas high desert, I promised myself I would spend more time discovering and being me, with whatever time I had left—days, months, years.  The time is always the right time for it, he whispers in your ear. We never completely get there, but the journey—oh, the journey is so grand. I will write poetry for me, maybe dabble in prose, walk, ride my bike, read more, listen to more good music, dance, seek out good company, love as much as I can—let as much of the petty bullshit roll off my shoulders.  Lofty goals—not goals, process, he whispers.  It doesn’t matter if you get distracted, even lost in the dark woods—the road is always there waiting for you.

I sip my coffee.  Take a breath.

Love,

Brady

9/30/2017

They wheeled Kathy out of her apartment yesterday in a gurney as I was returning from an afternoon walk in a park overlooking the valley.  At first I didn’t recognize her. Her neighbor whispers thinks she is dying, something that is part of the routine in this community.

I find myself thinking this morning of Loren Easley’s “The Brown Wasp” and the great eastern terminal building where the dying would go just to sit in the waiting room and be in the midst of the living.  Old men, there were no women there, he writes, were like the brown wasps that cling to the nest in winter. Something about the nest and the memory of life, how we cling to the memory of things—all creatures. This is an essay old people would like, a class once told me. You will be there soon, I responded. Soon happens rather quickly.

I watch a man push himself backwards in his wheel chair, slowly making his way down the hall of the commons. He says hello. I am still alive, he seems to be saying to me. I say hello and nod my appreciation. So am I, I want to tell him, though at times it seems barely.

Sharen tells me her children put her here two years before she wanted to come. I thought when I turned eighty, she says, but I am only seventy-eight, and they put me here anyway.  They didn’t want me living alone in my house. She has been in the retirement community a couple of weeks. She isn’t happy about it, but she smiles, talks about how she only eats her evening meals in the common dinning room. I would eat too much if I ate here all the time. Melinda once talked to her sisters about someday having to put me in a “home.” I will be a runner if you do, I told her. A runner is a resident who continually escapes the confines of assisted living and strikes out on his own, usually on foot, usually only making it a few blocks. I will make it all the way to Canada, I told her. She laughed.

When you get old, your children can put you in places you don’t necessarily want to go.

Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas steal a train in Tough Guys.

Thing is, I don’t want to steal a train. Burt and Kirk steal the train because for them the train was their nest, who they were. I want to sit on the edge of the ocean with someone I love, wake up a three in the morning next to her. I want to ride my bicycle up the strand and sit under LAX. Watch the planes come in while the sun is rising. Maybe that’s too much like the great eastern terminal. I want to smell the coffee brewing. Maybe talk to God, and tell him he shouldn’t make it so hard on some people while making it all too easy on some others, that he seems to punish too many good but slow people and reward too many goons. But God is God, and I do enjoy this so much—this breathing thing.

I will smoke brisket this coming Saturday and read some poetry with a few friends. I have invited hundreds, but maybe a dozen or so will attend. But whatever, we will be a cutting edge or sorts, the living still. Of course that means making it to Saturday. Nothing is guaranteed.

Love,

Brady

9/29/2017

Googled Tim O’Brien last night and discovered he was born three days before I was born. We are both original boomers, along with Susan Sarandon who shares my birthday, which means nothing in any grand scheme of things, but then I’m not sure I believe in grand schemes. Tim ended up in Vietnam. I sat at a desk at the National Security Agency where I kept track of my time served in the navy on a homemade calendar attached on the side tray of the desk. I marked off each day like a prisoner keeping track of every moment he spent in his cell. Retrospectively, I had it easy. Still, I yearned to be somewhere else—one the road, in Crete, letting my hair grow long, just to be free.

I remember how the air tasted different the day I was released from active duty. I drove up to Maine with my first wife and new daughter to visit my aunt, just driving without having to log out. It was October and the Maine leaves were as brilliant as my new found liberty. I chopped wood one afternoon I was there, and chopping wood was the most wonderful thing I had done in years. I met a couple who had a cabin on a lake. They had bookshelves full of books. I picked up a copy of Kafka and read the beginning of “Metamorphosis.” Gregor Samsa wakes up to discover he has transformed into a giant insect. The poet seeks metaphor.

I met Tim O’Brien once in Boston. Tim knew my aunt. “Myra and I used to play poker,” he told me. I doubt he remembers me. He was reading from The Things They Carried that evening—about killing a man who was the enemy, but who was also just a man.

I heard Tim speak once at the Austin book fair. He talked about the nature of war, the mud of war, being bogged down in a field of shit, literal shit. Someone criticized him for taking the war personally, that there were grander and more abstract reasons for our being in Vietnam, for our going into Iraq, that transcend the personal. Then go there yourself, O’Brien answered. Get off your ass and go there yourself, and you will find out how personal it can be. The response should require no explanation, no further debate.

But then we do have patriots sitting at computer terminals guiding drones and killing people half way across the world. There is no courage required, no honor. At the end of the day, these remote killers drive home for supper.

How do you explain what is lost, the poet asks.

This morning I eat breakfast at a retirement community dinning hall and listen to the men at the table next to mine talk about the American and Italian army, something about two soldiers. From their age, I assumed they were WWII veterans, but they could be a little young for that war. Not many are left. I sip my coffee and think about the aging veterans of Vietnam.  I remember Tim O’Brien writing that he went to Vietnam because he didn’t have the courage not to. I understand.

Love,

Brady

9/27/2017

Kathy sat next to me last evening for dinner. She did last evening too. I’m staying at a retirement community in Redlands, we eat dinner at the common dinning room, Kathy is Connie’s neighbor, and she seems to enjoy my company. Actually, she seems to enjoy everyone’s company. Soft spoken, a former junior high PE teacher, Kathy has a large tumor in her abdomen. The doctors have done all they can, and she is calmly waiting to die. It will be very soon, she tells me. You will be okay, I tell her. It’s something I told my aunt the day she was dying, something I told my daughter. You will be okay, I say with all the conviction I could muster, more conviction than I normally carry with me. I believe I will too, she tells me.

I sip my coffee.

This morning on Facebook I post the following assertion: To say that all lives matter as a counter argument to black lives matter instead of as the warrant of the more complete argument—because all lives matter, black lives should matter too—is to miss the point of the democratic experiment. I hesitated when I posted it, because I knew the kind of blow back I might receive, blowback I didn’t want to contend with. A simple statement that should be obvious from my point of view, and yet I hesitated.

I find myself living is a Kafkaesque dreamscape where people rant about football players disrespecting the flag, many of them people who display the flag of the Confederate Army of Tennessee and who talked openly about secession or the armed overthrow of the American government when a black president held office. Point missers, Kristen would call them. If Trump is not elected, we will take up arms, some of them threatened before the election. If Trump is impeached, we will take up arms, they chant now.

You will be okay, I tell my daughter as I hold her arm and press my face close to hers, her O2 levels dangerously low, her blood pressure dropping. You are surrounded by angels in the room, I tell her. But my country, the one I grew up loving deeply—

I post a simple assertion, one that should stand the test of common sense and decency, and yet I hesitate.

Love,

Brady

9/26/2017

My mother in law’s flat screen isn’t getting the cable signal so I went this weekend without football. Sunday is a whole day unto itself. Should have quit watching that gladiator sport years ago, but now it’s all complicated by the Trump urging us to boycott the NFL. That high school classmate I was talking about chimed in on FB to say she didn’t want to hear about injustice from any multi-millionaire who had the morals of a goat and she will be joining the boycott. But we elected a man with the morals of a goat president, I offered. Bill Clinton, she responded. Him too, I responded. Seems we like goats.

So now do I watch NFL football or not. Such a distracting problem.

In the meantime, I sent a few dollars to a Puerto Rico relief fund.  Used royalties from my book to pay for it. Poetry helps, he says.

I dreamed I was at a reunion last night. We are old in this dream.  Usually I’m thirty or so in my dreams, my best age. An old girl friend approaches me, then falls into my arms crying. She confesses she got carried away at the reunion and did something reckless and she is worried, she knows, her husband will find out. You didn’t do something reckless with me, I respond. Then I wake up before anything gets resolved.

I’m trying to figure if my old classmate who didn’t want to hear about injustice from a multi-millionaire is admitting the injustice and is complaining about the source of the protest or if she believes all injustice in this country ended with the Sand Creek episode, or maybe with Tulsa, though I doubt she knows either of the events. I don’t think I like her very much.

In the meantime I very much suspect the cloud of gloom that hangs over me, my writing, almost everything I do, since we elected Goat Boy is a contributing factor to my current health issues.  Oh God, I am a snowflake. Shit, I am a snowflake—melting on the back window of a heated car. Shit, shit, shit, shit… To top it off, I too have the morals of a goat, whatever the hell that means.

But I don’t wave the battle flag of the Army of Virginia and talk about respecting the Star Spangled Banner at the same time. There is a limit to my hypocrisy, though apparently no limit to my willingness to steal a line from Tombstone.

It’s Tuesday morning in Redlands, California. Tomorrow, Barbara and I will go to Hermosa Beach and spend the night. Maybe we will dance on the pier while singing “City of Stars.” Will walk along the beach with trousers rolled listening for mermaids.

Kiss me quick, the poet says.

Love,

Brady

9/25/2017

This morning I read a post from an old high school classmate who slams the NFL for its arrogance, its disregard for country, flag, and constitution. She claims NFL stands for “Not for long.” She talks about how the phrase came to her the night before while lying in bed.  I wonder if she knows that phrase has already been used by people giving financial advise to young rookies coming into the NFL, not for long referring to the short life expectancy of an NFL career, a career that can end in a single play, that will end as soon as someone younger, faster, better, comes along—and for most that won’t be long.

A friend of my old classmate chimes in with her the NFL stands for the “Negro Football League” as if that in itself was an indictment. I am reminded of Stanley Crouch’s sermon “Premature Autopsies” where the sound of blues merges with an old spiritual sermon that seeks to create a bridge between the lost and the lame with the majesty and nobility that exists in the true meaning of democracy. The voice cries out against the money lenders of slavery who never knew the difference between an office and an auction block, between the sacred and the profane—the old dragons who think themselves so grand. Now it seems the old dragons have come crawling out of their caves. We thought them dead, but they were just sleeping and waiting. They snarl at the arrogance of the old slave and servant class—get the son of a bitch off the field, the grand dragon himself belches.

The poet sips his coffee, listens to the ache in his muscles. The dragon blocks the sun, but the noble sound gives one hope.  It also, that noble sound, calls one to stand against the dragon. Or kneel in a kind of defiance.

The dragon talks about heritage and history embodied in the anthem.  But if one knows the third stanza of the anthem, the one the dragon doesn’t teach you to sing, you find it celebrating the death of the slave fighting for his freedom.

No refuge could save the hireling and slave,

From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave.

Do you understand what you mean by heritage, the poet mutters.  Do you understand that your heritage is more than the profanity offered by the dragon, that there is a noble sound that embraces the true meaning of democracy.  Listen to it.

Love,

Brady

9/24/2017

Sunday morning in Topanga Canyon, California. Yesterday, Diana performed a chapter from her third Latvian novel, still in process, at the local Library—Topanga literary festival. Talked to Steve Ericson. I taught one of his novels. Read three of my poems at the open mic. Later, a gathering at the Mathur’s where the conversation flowed without effort. The wine and beer flowed a little too. Spent the whole day without news, without the flat screen images attacking my senses. Woke up this morning to read the rants of a mad man—never mind.

I don’t think there is anything I enjoy more than conversation with congenial people, intelligent people, people very much alive. I find that a lot in California. Maybe it’s who I’m related to here—and their friends. But I think it’s deeper than that. California has always taken a good deal of abuse from the Texas perspective, political abuse, cultural abuse, etc. I had a mother and future student in my office one afternoon talking about Hollyweird and the Southern California corruption of our culture. The mother was the wife of one of my university’s vice presidents. Her daughter wanted to know if she should major in English. She wanted to write children’s books but didn’t want to read literature with sex in it. Major in accounting, I told her. And I liked Southern California, the people I knew there. I like Texas too, and my friends there. I don’t find the need to diminish one place to feel somehow more validated—though I am sometimes guilty of that sin.

Dipped in the hot tub this morning. Of course I did. I sip my coffee. Morning in the canyon. I prefer more open sky, but I could adjust to living here. Stayed up late with Kris who talked about taking me to Latvia someday—in the summer.  Not the winter. It’s too damn cold in the winter. Somewhere in the conversation Kris tells me how he more or less lucked into being a producer, how things sometimes just fall into place. But neither one of us thinks its just chance.

I am looking at my wife standing on the edge of the deck, leaning on the rail, and looking down the canyon.

Love,

Brady

9/22/2017

I am too old to drive for twelve hours in a day. I need to remind myself of that—the tendency picked up living in the car as a kid, my father driving from before sunup to ten at night. I did love watching the sun come up on those drives. I hated watching my father eat from a paper bag full of candy and not sharing with us. But that’s another story.

We made the trek across the southwestern desert yesterday, from Van Horn to Redlands. Stopped for a Chinese buffet lunch just outside of Tucson in Marana. Chinese buffet and the southwest desert make an interesting combination. The customers seem to walk in with sand and grit between their teeth. The staff seems to be hiding from ICE.  I ate pork, broccoli, red and green peppers, onions, and rice. Drank unsweetened ice tea. Then back on the road to race the traffic to Phoenix. As we approach Mesa, I point out that Julie used to live just off to the right a few miles. All those years we passed her house without knowing. All those years my trying to find her to tell her I was sorry for pulling her hair on a dare when we were in fifth grade in Perris, only to find her on the net after she died. Obituaries include maiden names. It would have been nice to stop by and see her, Barbara says.

The mountains here look like the heads of sleeping ancient gods, their faces looking up at the sky.  The drive crowded with memories of previous trips. I tear up now and then when I remember stopping at a particular gas station with the different combinations of my daughters. The vast emptiness of the open ground—none of it really empty—somehow makes me appreciate the fragile beauty of being alive, the intense pain of knowing that everyone I have ever loved has or will die. And I find myself muttering about people who are too stupid to understand. Virginia cries out from an old manuscript when talking about the leaders of Europe in the early twentieth century, seeing their faces in the flash of cannon fire—so ugly, so stupid.  Nothing has changed.  We have too many old men, they are mostly old men, who when it was their turn to serve found convenient ways to avoid it, who have never tasted the immediacy of death, who bluster about strength through arms, who threaten the lives of millions—most of whom who simply want to live their ordinary lives, their precious ordinary lives.  People who eat bread and olive oil for breakfast, or fish, who take delight in the laughter of their children.

Too many people who are willing to follow those men.  So ugly, so stupid.

I am sitting in Redlands, California, sipping my first cup of coffee.  My neck and shoulder muscles stiff from the drive, my legs cramped a little.  I am too old, too sick, to drive for twelve hours at a time, I tell myself. I need to stretch. Need to walk. Perhaps pray for the survival of the earth, though after Melinda died, I find it difficult to pray for anything. Something happens to your belief in magic when you lose a child. Still, the world needs something. Maybe a little magic.

Love,

Brady

9/20/2017

Barbara and I are driving to California starting today.  Not the usual before sunrise start. We haven’t even packed yet. Not even sure which route I will take. Santa Fe is too far out of the way, else I would stop by Maria’s and drink one of their margaritas.

My first road trip to California was in January 1956.  We were moving from Puerto Rico to Perris, California. My father was to be station at a triple A outfit next to March Air Force base. I was nine. Somewhere in the California adventure that year we bought our first television set. That summer I played my first organized baseball game, though in Puerto Rico we played spontaneous baseball year round.  On the island, I only had access to a right handed baseball glove.  I play baseball left handed.  A right handed glove fits on your left hand which meant catching and switching for me. On Christmas morning 1955 in Okay, Arkansas, during the trip to southern California, I got my first left handed glove—one that fits on the right hand. I went to two baseball tryout camps with that glove—close as I ever got to the major leagues.

My second trip to California was to Monterey in 1967. I studied Portuguese in Monterey at DLIWC, though I never quite grasped the ironies of the language. Did make it to the fairgrounds of the Monterey Pop Festival.  Also spend a weekend in San Francisco that summer with a guy I knew in college who was stationed in Treasure Island. The world, it felt, was turning that summer, and being in the navy, I felt I was on the outside looking in.

My third trip was in the summer of 1977 with Barbara.  Since then I have gone back at least every year, sometimes more. I love being next to the Pacific Ocean. I hate the traffic, but the traffic is more and more the same everywhere. I don’t like the idea of playing Russian roulette with the inevitable big earthquake.  The ones in Mexico this week are a reminder. But then we barely missed the Jarrell tornado here, and lightening strikes near my house are common. And I do love being next to the Pacific Ocean, the cold water, the crashing waves, the piers—and the people, the collage of people.

I grew up in the Army which was both a kind of middle America and at the same time on the cutting edge of something else.  The Army which was both very class conscious and at the same time one of the more egalitarian cultures in America. I grew up in an integrated world when the rest of my extended family lived in a segregated one. I was the only “white” kid in my first grade class on the island until the twins, Diane and Sue, showed up. The only kid whose first language wasn’t Spanish. My father was a mustang officer who never went to high school, received a battlefield commission in the Korean War. The men I knew growing up were smart, knew their history, had fought in two wars. The kids I grew up with were smart, had lived all over the world.  I was raised on the notion that democracy was the natural outcome of history, that to know things, to be educated, was the birthright of everyone.

In the fifth grade in Perris, California, my teacher, Jack Lambie, taught us aerodynamics and well as arithmetic. Showed us how to build gliders with six foot wing spans. Explained the relationship time had with speed. Encouraged my girlfriend, Julie, to write plays which we performed.  In the fifth grade in Perris, Mr. Scott taught us how to play Sousa.

It’s time to pack.

Love,

Brady

9/18/2017

Instead of walking this morning, my brother and I drove to Round Rock to pick up a 2500 galloon rain barrel and an 1100 galloon retention barrel.  We unloaded the rain barrel at his house then delivered the retention barrel at an industrial site in north Temple.  It took most of the morning. Unloading the 380 pound rain barrel alone took effort, but it was something I couldn’t do two months ago. I miss being stronger, miss lifting weights, but I seem to be getting better.

Did ride the bike this afternoon for 37 minutes according to my fitbit.  Light hill work.

Listening to The Stones in Havana. Amazing old goats—just amazing.  I take a peek at the crowds, young faces moving with the music. The same Stones Alan Bloom declared almost appropriately dead in 1987, thank God—The Stones symptomatic of the culture’s decent into meaninglessness and moral decay.  Bloom died in 1992 from AIDS, according to Saul Bellow at least. The Stones on the other hand are playing in Havana.

I switch from the Havana goats, to the younger Mick singing “Emotional Rescue” on Spotify—yes, you could be mine…You climb into a car and don’t look back. A recurring memory. I watch the car pull away not realizing the metaphor.

I was talking to my new rheumatologist Monday.  She treated Melinda a little less than four years ago, I tell her.  For her arthritic hands.  Her hands got better, I told her, but her lungs didn’t. She died. My new doctor sunk a little. She didn’t remember Melinda, but when I said she was practicing in New Mexico, it rang a bell with her. We talked about the possible causes for my inflammation, possible treatments. My test two months ago indicated that I lost two pints of red blood. That doesn’t sound good, but I am getting better. I opted for another blood test next month, then we would go from there.

Somewhere in the soup of talk, she said that life comes with so much pain and hardship. You’re a doctor, I told her. It’s your line of work. The poet knows. He has no choice but to dip into the dark emotions of love, loss, and longing. But this is still a gift, the poet tells her. This very short life—full of laughter and tears. Still, a gift.

None of us survive this. The species won’t survive this, our penchant for preferring idiots and bullies—the earth will cease in a few moments. God blinks and existence is called into being during the interval only to cease just as quickly.

You climb into a car and don’t look back, but it doesn’t matter, don’t you see. It’s only a single scene in the story, and stories don’t really end anymore than they begin. That’s just the convention. Stories simply are.

Love,

Brady

9/16/2017

I was watching CNN yesterday when Clay Travis made his “I believe in only two things completely, the first amendment and boobs” in the context of should Jemele Hill be fired for tweeting that Donald Trump is a white supremacist who surrounds himself with white supremacists. Brooke Baldwin was perplexed at first.  Did you say—They're the only two things that never let me down, Travis affirmed.  Baldwin cuts the interview short.  Lost in the shuffle is Jemele Hill who the white house has announced should be fired. And all I ever said was that Trump was a sewer who surrounds himself with sewage. Maybe lost a few friends over that remark, but then what’s a few friends in the service of a good line.

Had I been on the panel with Travis and being the father of five daughters, I would have probably felt the urge to beat the shit out of him, maybe even given into that urge.  But my daughters would have been just as offended by my actions as they would by his characterization of women. I don’t need you protecting my honor, one of my daughters has already told me. I am perfectly capable of defending myself. And she is. But the truth is, I have been working out my whole life, I am getting old and losing my strength, and I’ve never beaten the shit out of anyone, which I think was part of the purpose of my working out all those years. So it isn’t so much to protect my daughters’ honor—the act itself a way of denying my girls their absolute freedom as human beings—as it is just this need to fight something, to kick ass for whatever reason. I have a good friend, artist, and poet in Austin who tells me that’s just my jungle DNA coming out, the darker side of being male. She’s right.

My wanting to beat the shit out of someone is a flaw in my character, I admit. It played a part in my quitting a perfectly good job once or twice, this urge I have to pound some bullying boss—I think the actual thought was something like how easy it would be to snap his chicken shit neck, and I knew I had to leave before the thought took root. Prison my have been a deterrent, but I’m not sure. I think it was more that while I recognized the dark impulses dancing in my skull, it’s not who and what I chose to be. It’s as if there is something that feeds on violence and anger that I don’t want to feed, some dark angel.  Even my writing about it seems to feed the beast somehow.

What Travis said was worse.  It’s a worn argument, this reducing women to sexual body parts. Worn because we seem too stupid to get it. Worse, we seem to embrace it now.

There are two cups of coffee on my desk.  Seems I am confused.  Poured one cup of coffee, typed a few lines, returned to the kitchen and poured a second cup.  Both hot. Hell, I’ll sip from both. I’m sure there’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

Love,

Brady

9/15/2017

This morning as I was walking past the school bus stop in the new subdivision I overhear a young girl—He wears the same clothes everyday. I don’t think he even takes a shower. Have you smelled him… Someone else joins in, but I walk out of listening range. These bits and pieces one picks up. I sometimes sleep in my clothes now that I don’t work anymore, I want to tell her, but I am just an old man walking by, perhaps someone she doesn’t even see.

I am trying not to think about the news this morning. The hurricanes have gone, and while the debris of the storms are still piled in the streets of Texas and Florida, houses flattened on several islands, the talk moves back to North Korea and the pissing contest between men who are the designated leaders of two countries—one threatens fire and fury like the world as never seen, the other promises ash and darkness. I have friends who rally behind one of them, though I use the word friends liberally.

I find myself thinking about the boy who wears the same clothes every day.  I wonder what he eats for breakfast—if he eats breakfast. I wonder if the girl who is talking about him knows the damage she is doing—it’s only something she’s learned from the rest of us, those of us to followed then set precedent. This need we have to be somehow better than someone else—worse, to render the other less.

Even this commentary runs the risk of being little more than declaring myself to be somehow above the fray.

I sip my coffee, eat my toast with olive oil, listen to my Spotify playlist called Laid Back Coffee—Carole King singing “You Got a Friend,” look at the oaks outside my window—last night Charley and James spotted a small copperhead on the brick wall next to my front door—we left it alone—another sip of coffee.  This morning at five, I picked up Craig to take him to work. His car is in the shop getting a new engine. Barbara is spotting him the money. Craig tells me he will pay her back with the lion’s share of his paycheck—and he probably will. But getting up at four-thirty—Barbara is in Austin babysitting—has disrupted something in my body’s chemistry. My walk was slower this morning, my typing slower, my brain—

Truth is, I don’t feel very much above the fray. I am an old man walking past young kids at a school bus stop.

We wait across the street from your house in Perris for the bus to take us to school—we are in the fifth grade.  I get there early every morning just to watch you walk out of your house. To the north there are snow topped mountains.  Underneath those mountains in Redlands a girl heads to her kindergarten class. I meet that girl years later in east Austin—we are both teaching Jr. High. The last time I saw you, the poet writes, I was playing baseball. If you saw me, you hid it well—I imagine you alive, emerging from your house.

 Coda: Though the poet imagines her alive, the girl who sat in a car on the side of the road while he was taking infield with his little league team dies in Arizona six years ago. He never got to tell her—

Love,

Brady

9/14/2017

Over the past twelve years or so, I’ve noticed I feel better if I cut certain foods from my diet—wheat and dairy being two main culprits—but discovering Dave’s Killer Bread  has caused me to reconsider the virtues of feeling better.  Dave’s bread is manna—manna being the flaky substance, like frost on the morning ground, given by God to his children in the wilderness, to be picked before it melted in the sun, to be eaten that day, not to be saved except for the Sabbath. To toast Dave’s Killer Bread and eat it with butter or fresh olive oil is a meal in itself. With black coffee, it becomes poetry.

Much more expensive than the gooey white bread that crowds the shelves, but gooey white bread is just gooey white bread.

Barbara and I are talking this morning about living—how if we were young again we would simply enjoy the moment more deeply, so why not learn to do that now. Now is what we have—only now is packed with memory. 

We drive to HEB and I talk about how HEB is connected to my returning home with Melinda after living with her in New Mexico, about how I always felt a stranger in Las Vegas, New Mexico, though I was treated well, how when I shopped at HEB for the first time after returning to Belton I felt I was home. It was something in the body language of the people shopping there, something in the rhythm of their voices—I have known these people most of my life.  It’s not that I fit, certainly not politically, and I was eleven before we moved here—traveling from base to base as an army brat—but my voice was developed more here than anywhere.  I speak and write Central Texas, with a dash of Arkansas, and heavily spiced with whatever it is we picked up in Oklahoma, Puerto Rico, and California.

Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be comfortable living on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, or somewhere in Paris, or in New York, or back in Austin where I would run the hike and bike trail around Town Lake (now Lady Bird Lake) wearing shoes without socks and a pair of shorts, soaking up the sun. I miss running.  Running has become 4 ½ mile walks down the road of the new subdivision to the river where for a half a mile I am a romantic poet celebrating nature. Maybe I will run again—lose a little more weight, get the inflammation thing cleared up, or even if I don’t.  I ride my bike now, so running might return. And running or walking either here or along the Pacific Ocean would work well enough. I sip my coffee. Take a breath.

I have to confess that today at HEB, I found myself looking at my wife.  She was trying to choose from the various diaper wipes—she uses them to clean the car interior—and I was looking at her thinking something entirely different. I have a friend who is constantly telling me how lucky I am, as if I didn’t know. But luck is only part of it. Part of it is simply looking and seeing.

I saw you working your garden one afternoon and wanted to paint you there, the poet says.

Love,

Brady 

9/13/2017

I spend part of the morning at a car dealership waiting for my new Outback to be serviced, already close to six thousand miles on the road. I try to read, but that’s almost impossible—the flat screen news covering the hurricane aftermaths, two people in the corner talking about the police—I don’t catch the point—a woman on her cell phone talking about her eyes, something about being blind though she drove her car to the dealership so I am misunderstanding something—all perfectly okay noise, but not white noise for me.

David Foster Wallace talked about the need for quiet, for a house free of television sounds, conversation, even music, so one might get about the serious work of reading and writing, thinking something through. I sit in a McDonald’s after leaving the car dealership eating a god awful breakfast—I swore never to eat at these places, but found myself turning in on impulse. The woman next to me is talking to the man next to her. The conversation a monologue about some conflict she is having with someone else.  “And I told him…” So many overheard conversations seems to be about these verbal disputes with some third party, always seeming to involve the phrase “and I told him.” Wallace hangs himself when his anti-depressant medication no longer works. I am eating an egg, bacon, cheese biscuit with greasy hash browns pressed to a kind of bar to be held in a paper holder and eaten without a fork. I feel my arteries clogging, a different kind of suicide. I’m not feeling depressed though, but who is to know these things.

In the dealership I watch a man dressed in a white shirt hurry across the parking lot into an adjacent building while checking his watch. He walked as if there were a purpose to it, someone to meet. I am not that man. In the morning when I walk through the sliver of wild that has become important to me, I walk without purpose. I sit in the waiting room and finally move into the zone where I can read the introduction to the Jeffers poems. Jeffers believed in and wrote long narrative poems, the kind no one reads anymore. He lived on the edge of the Pacific Ocean all his adult life, watched the waves crashing into the rocks, followed a hawk—I read his “The Beauty of Things.”

To feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things—earth, stone, and water,
Beast, man and woman, sun, moon and stars—
The blood-shot beauty of human nature, its thoughts, frenzies and passions,
And unhuman nature its towering reality—
For man’s half dream; man, you might say, is nature dreaming, but rock
And water and sky are constant—to feel
Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural
Beauty, is the sole business of poetry.
The rest’s diversion: those holy or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas,
The love, lust, longing: reasons, but not the reason.

How to explain a similar beauty in watching the man check his watch, listening to the woman talking about her eyes, though only catching bits of each life.  But each life, a life—tragically short and immensely beautiful.

The defiant insistence of the woman at McDonald’s that her life, who she was, counted in the scheme of things—and I told him.

Love,

Brady

9/12/2017

The woman who lost her small white dog several weeks ago sees me walking this morning and approaches. She tells me that after thirteen days on the loose they finally have Charlie back home. We set out nine live traps, she says. Caught one fox, one possum, and a dog named Charlie. He’s back home, the woman smiles.

Rachel writes to say that after a year and a half of pain she has neither the previously diagnosed Parkinson's nor dystonia but a movement disorder that can get better—a no meds kind of better.

I am becoming more functional—walked 4.5 miles this morning, yesterday morning. Did a light workout in the gym. My diet is better, but not what it should be.  Still, I’m sipping bone broth every morning, taking turmeric curcumin, drinking emergen-C, and swallow a few Advil capsules in the morning and at night (I’ve cut from four Advil a day to three).   I am scheduled to see the rheumatologist Friday. Only a three month wait.

Listening to Cowboy Junkies singing “I’m so lonesome I could cry.” Though I’m not, not today. Not yesterday. There are people I miss, terribly. But I haven’t been feeling lonesome for some time. I cry for Melinda maybe several times a day, but it just isn’t a lonesome feeling. How do I explain. I am alive in this world, on this planet, in this moment. That seems to be enough for now—somehow knowing now won’t last makes it enough.

I sip my coffee—something I should probably give up, but what the hell. Take a breath—single breath meditation.

I have a stack of new poetry books to read, picked up at Langdon. Nathan Brown’s Arse Poetica is sitting on top. Then there’s Alan Berecka’s Welcome to the Hamlet of Stittville.

I think about my friends who write poetry, who sit in coffee shops or at home working words on a page with pen or computer, hoping the string the right combination of words together that will somehow transcend the limitations of being words, hoping to somehow make it right or better. Alan reminds us that Shakespeare—but we know where that line goes. Poems don’t change the world, we say. But we don’t really know that for sure. It does seem to bother the shit out of despots and other goons who periodically round up poets and intellectuals in the dark night, drive them to some secluded place. Maybe that’s the best we can hope for—to annoy the perpetrators of ignorance and fear.

My coffee has grown cold. 

Florida is smashed.  Southeast Texas is busy stripping soaked sheet rock and carrying water logged furniture out to the curb.  The sun is shining this morning. Fall is on its way. I am alive for now.

Kiss me quick.

Love,

Brady

9/11/2017

I believe in God, the poet confesses.  Don’t ask me why—maybe childhood programming, all the stories about Adam and Eve, Abraham and Isaac, Lott’s wife, David and Goliath, Daniel in the lions’ den—but I read Hitchens and agree with him, religion poisons everything. Something about the notion of purity which becomes another kind of obscenity urging the slaughter of anyone tainted with heresy, anyone different from the tribe, the clan, the faithful.  

Today is the anniversary of the attack on the twin towers—Barbara Olsen riding the plane into the pentagon, though conspiracy theorists claim there was no plane hitting that building, Barbara Olsen being a fictional character who posed as a real person on CNN until it was time for her to disappear. How we came together that day, the talking heads on the sports talk shows this morning are saying almost nostalgically—not counting the thousands and thousands of Muslims Donald Trump saw dancing in the New Jersey streets.  I saw them, he says.  Others say they saw them too, he says, as if that were all the evidence needed.

I watched the towers collapse on television.  I read how the people in New York were reaching out to help each other. There were no thousands dancing in the New Jersey streets. Still, the conjured image serves the purpose of the faithful.  It doesn’t matter they weren’t there.

I talked to Audell that afternoon after the attack.  He was worried that in our response, we would abandon liberty for the promise of security. Even then we knew, people who bothered to think it through. On a data bank somewhere is a list of every book I’ve bought in the last sixteen years or so. On a data bank somewhere is a recording of every cell phone call, every email—

It is cool this morning.  On my walk by the river, a few leaves have begun to fall on the trail, crunching my steps. A pecan, still in its overcoat, drops from a tree and lands next to me. Some animal moves through the brush. The river is quiet, the water shallow. I am walking better. I’ve cut down on the Advil. Still, I can feel my nerves on edge under my skin. But here, next to the river, everything seems in balance, in this sliver of wild.

Back in the neighborhood a dog barks at me.  Growls really.  Its owner, a young mother walking the dog while her very young daughter rides a tiny bicycle, restrains it with the leash.  The dog pulls against her as if to charge me if it could.  I am carrying my walking poles, and for a moment consider removing the rubber tips from the ends of the pole.

The dog is only doing what is in its nature, but then so am I, ready to defend myself.

I turn the corner.  A woman approaches me pushing a stroller. Nice day for a walk, she smiles.

Love,

Brady

9/5/2017

Just signed a petition.  I think the last time I signed a petition I was waiting to register at UT one summer—long before on-line registration.  Signed petitions all the time then.  Not sure whose enemies list that might have put me on, probably no one’s.  This petition was addressed to Governor Abbot requesting that the state eliminate the Star Test and use the money instead to rebuild the Texas schools. That standardized test are basically another money grab should be obvious to anyone who bothers with the matter.

I stole that last phrase from Orwell—“Politics and the English Language.”  It’s a good phrase.  I use it often, but in Orwell’s essay in goes like this:  Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit…

To bother with the matter at all, while casual in its tone, suggest that one dips into the subject past the customary slogans.  To bother with—to examine critically, the ponder over, to think something through.  But to think at all invites all kinds of trouble, the poet says while listening to his Mozart playlist.

Another hurricane is moving through the Atlantic, picking up strength.  Models have it possibly moving up Florida, though there are other possibilities.  Late morning, Barbara and I have pedicures. The two Vietnamese women working on our feet have fun with me, suggesting I have my toenails painted like my wife’s.  No extra charge the woman clipping my nails tells me. She also tells my I need to soak in vinegar and water to help with the spots on my feet and legs.  It’s a forty year old rash, and I’ve tried almost everything, but I tell her I will give is a try.  A woman having her toes done in the chair next to us is hiding out in Belton.  Her house is in Houston, and she can’t move back, not because her house was flooded by Harvey, but because sewage and other toxins are in the water all around us, she says.

A friend posts the question about the wisdom in rebuilding in the flood plains along the coast—anywhere along the coast.  That begs the question as to what is and is not now a flood plain.  The same question can be asked about refineries and other industrial sites, but thinking it through leads to cognitive overloads.  Easier to call man made climate change a hoax.  But even if it weren’t man made, the poets asks—though it’s been awhile since he’s written a poem. 

The muse seems out of reach, he explains.

Tomorrow they drive to Granbury for a literary festival.  Three days of poetry and beer in the company of good and congenial people. 

Love,

Brady

P.S.  The barbeque and poetry is scheduled for Saturday, October 7th at Brady’s house.  You’re invited. 

9/4/2017

Channel surfing last night between football and baseball games, and came across a speaker on c-span talking about academics, intellectuals, and progressives as being anti-American.  Academics and intellectuals control the culture, he said, and we must learn our history in order to defeat them.  I sip my coffee and try to grapple with the reality that many of my friends and relatives see me as one of them, and while the notion of being an intellectual is flattering, the claim that I am anti-American unsettles me.  Who are you to accuse me of anything, I mutter at the flat screen. I served. That should be enough, he says, though he has always known that service is never enough.

The speaker went on to speak about our founding fathers, how deeply rooted they were in the Judeo-Christian ethic.  I wonder if he has read Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson—the author of that much abused phrase in the Declaration, and Nature’s God. But then I am reminded that much of Jefferson has been removed from the Texas history textbooks and replaced with Mosses.  Jefferson it seems has some quirky things to say about the Bible and religion.  As did Franklin. Never mind Thomas Paine, but everyone knew he was a heretic.

I read an article about the new right and their embrace of Nietzsche and his notion of Übermensch or superman, though they misread him, about their notion of Christendom as opposed to Christianity. These new would-be fascists jettison the teachings of Jesus as a doctrine which empowers the weak to suppress the strong, and instead see Christendom as a unifying political force.  They envision a world where the strong will prevail. 

I take a breath. I am reminded of something Jesus said to Pilot when Pilot was telling Jesus he had the power to crucify him or free him.  Jesus spoke of power in an other worldly sense—Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above. (Tyndale) Pilot orders him crucified, and we are left to decide whether or not we believe the rest of the story. A stone rolls away from the tomb.

I know history well enough to know what fascism looks like, smells like.  I know what happens to the “weak” under fascism, what happens to “the other.” 

Then there is Jules in Pulp Fiction who, though he misquotes Ezekiel, understands in the end it is the duty of the strong to protect the weak, not to enslave them or exploit them.  

I think about these things in the morning after my walk.  I am reminded that my father always hated it, that I thought about those things.  That boy is always thinking, he hissed at me with his pointed finger.  But then I imagine he saw me as anti-American.

Love,

Brady  

9/3/2017

Sunday morning is already gone, slipped out the back when I wasn’t looking. I did walk the river today—and up the monster hill—for the first time in months. My body seems to be recovering slowly, or maybe a momentary reprieve. I stand up from a low chair without using my hands, a symbolic gesture of defiance on my part. I remember an old 1960s Playboy cartoon image of a mouse giving the finger to a raptor as its shadow, talons spread, looms over mouse and the brick wall behind him. I feel that way sometimes.

I sip the bone broth made yesterday.  Then coffee. An interesting combination of taste.

A friend tells me she doesn’t read my “literary” post, so I will try to refrain today.  I watched college football almost all day yesterday, the UT game while I was waiting for the Subaru service department to reprogram my car’s computer so the alternator will charge the battery on short as well as long drives.  They also replaced a dead battery.  UT lost.  The whole day seemed lost. Weekends during football season feel more and more that way for me. It’s as if I were addicted to a drug that no longer supplied the highs I remember but still had its hold on me. I wonder if the highs were real, or was it some illusion shared with people who have lost themselves in the mythology. I think the high was more from watching the girl in the brown coat walking across campus during the fall, the wind blowing her hair. Somehow the image of her dark brown hair merging with the sounds of the band playing at the stadium. The truth though is I am no longer sure she was wearing a brown coat. 

Barbara wore a brown coat when I first meet her, but that was years later.

The remaining two oaks outside my window look as if they are dying and recovering at the same time.  They drink the waters from Harvey’s rain. New shoots with leaves sprout from the thinker limbs while the old branches are bare. Searching for metaphor.

Myra posts about my grandfather on Facebook. There are just some people you don’t get over missing.

A cold front is supposedly coming next week. Barbara tells me she wants us to go to California after my rheumatology appointment on the 15th.  I have obligations, but the whole point of being retired was to be able to go somewhere on a whim.  There are people to see both here and there.  Let’s think about it, she says.  Of course that will depend in part on what my rheumatologist tells me.  Or it may not.

Love,

Brady

9/2/2017

Tiresias is visited by Odysseus in hell—blind Tiresias, seven years a woman, one who can understand birds, who informs Oedipus of his crime.  Oedipus who kills his father and marries his mother, the impressively hot Jocasta, all because he tries to avoid his destiny—which was to kill his father and marry his mother.  The lesson, I have been told more than once, is don’t mess with the gods, as if one could. Destiny gobbles you up either way.

Someone chatters about free will, something given by God so we can chose, though the choice is already known.  I sip my coffee and wonder if the architect knows exactly how many cups, or if his insights are more general in nature. The ritual, the sacrament—part of it being the coffee has grown cold, and the poet goes to the kitchen to pour a fresh cup.

The fat Buddha laughs at me. He’s been sitting on my desk for years—first in my office at the Baptist university and now in my home—collecting dust, laughing at me. Why do you struggle so much, he asks. Destiny, I answer. He laughs a deep belly laugh. Of course it is, he says.

I’ve hit a block, the poet says. Come to the point in my self analysis, in confronting my demons, where going both farther and further would risk hurting someone still breathing, someone who might—he doesn’t seem to worry about the dead so much, though he does find himself talking to them from time to time, making amends when he can.

Tiresias appears in the Cantos. I fumble my way through a stanza or two. All of western literature in a stanza or two.

This morning on our walk, the guy cutting the fields stops his tractor and comes over to talk with us. Haven’t seen you guys in months, he says.  He has been mowing the fields being turned into new subdivisions all over the county, he explains. Explains his supervisor has hinted he is slow in his work. So I showed him the map, he says. These are his exact works—holy shit. It’s a conversational mode I hear over and over, as if it were an old record skipping back on itself.  And I told him, is a repeated refrain. The unhappy, the dissatisfied—and I told him…

 I sip my coffee and toy with the notion of destiny.  The fat Buddha laughs and tells me to just let go.  But even letting go would be part of the knitting. The question remains, what do we ever decide.

Let go, the fat porcelain figure bought in Chinatown, San Francisco whispers.

Love,

Brady