Grape and Kamala turn 60

 

There is no refuting it; once you get to enough birthdays the numbers start to feel a little random. There are just so many of them! And what kind of meaning does a person want to attach to even a fairly even number like sixty, let alone, I don't know, 62, or 59?

Are these interesting questions?

Not particularly. 

But I am turning sixty too! And so I think about age, and these numbers, and yet I can't quite get them to be all that interesting.

On Grape's birthday, which is today, we like to reminisce about some happy times with him; a summer of miniature golf for instance, or crashing a car, swimming with hundreds of sharks or taking peyote. And so we need not particularly dwell on numbers. But that said, today I don't have much of a story. The time I am thinking about was too sweet, too complicated and yet simple for that, but fortunately I do have something else pertaining to that time in my bag of tricks.

Anyway, the period I have been thinking of was when he was a best man at my wedding and came out to Chicago, where myself and friends and some family had taken over the house of a friend of my mom in the lead-up to the best and most essential day of my life. It was a few days of drinking and midnight swimming in Lake Michigan, assembling a wedding outfit, and generally wandering the city. It was a moment of calm sweetness, all of its own thing. I have a picture of Grape from this time, 1991, so maybe he doesn't look exactly like this today. We are on the grass, by the lake. He is lying on me.

Despite the fact that this was merely a snapshot, if you click the picture, well...

He comes alive, like when I remember the time.

Bald Grape

 

Time heals all wounds, leaves a little scar, and eventually you're all scar.

This is a birthday post.

Happy birthday.

You know who you are.

What do you think of when you think of a bald Grape?

Hopefully you don't think "Aren't all grapes sort of bald? Who wants wine made from hairy grapes!!!"

Hopefully, as a passionate reader of clerkmanifesto, one who keeps charts and scores and spreadsheets, you instead think:

"Grape: Noted friend of clerkmanifesto, with a nickname of "Grape", he must have shaved his head at some point."

He did!

And since on his birthday we reminisce in one way or another about him (with a weird miss on that tradition in the crazy year of 2016, it haunts us to this day), we are surely going to be discussing something to do with his bald head.

We are!

I wasn't there when he shaved his head. But I will make this instructive preliminary point to any younger readers:

People did not commonly shave their heads around the early 1980's. So when Grape shaved his head it not only had an ahead-of-his-time quality, also his father was very upset.

Or so I heard.

I wasn't there when Grape's father allegedly got upset that he shaved his head.

But immediately after it all happened Grape and I went backpacking in Yosemite. There was a valley of granite there, carved into fabulous swirling potholes by running water high in the wilderness. We lay on a rock by the kind of idyllic stream I'm always trying to fake in my pictures these days, and Grape, with no hair on his head, told me all about the baldness.

I remember every word of that conversation!

No, just kidding.

All I remember is what, based on that conversation, I thought. I thought Grape's mom was upset that Grape shaved his head. And her way to express it was by saying she was mad that Grape would make his father so upset with his shaved head. 

Personally I think Grape's father was fine with Grape's shaved head.

But who knows?

Does Grape know?

He might. But it's not important now. 

It was forty years ago. 

His hair grew back.

In the Autumn of our lives we find wisdom

 

   

It is something of a tradition on Grape's birthday, Grape being an old and dear friend of mine, and his birthday being the day of the year he was born, which, coincidentally, is today, to write, in honor of this Grape person, a story of an escapade from our youth.

But we are old now, and I have forgotten them all.

or

We are enlightened and live purely in the present.

or

I've been doing this so long I've used up all the good escapades.

or

I remember lying on the floor of his room, or some room, anyone's room anywhere, with Grape, listening to music, like it was a thing two 17 year old's could actually do. Just... listening to music.

or

or

or...

As happens in all these vast decades that Grape and I have lived far away form each other, a few months went by where I did not hear from Grape.  No word. No email. No note. 

And fairly speaking, he did not hear from me. 

And just as this state of affairs was starting to worry me unavoidably, I put a picture on my blog (my blog is where you are now) of a bee.

Grape commented on this picture. 

He said something like "I like this picture of a bee."

It made me so happy every part of me momentarily untensed and floated.

And I was enlightened and lived in the present.

Which I hope Grape is doing today, on his birthday.

Summer reading adventure chapter four: first attempt!

 

So, they legalized certain marijuana edibles in my state, just a nibble around the edges of full legalization. Intrigued by this, I bought a couple of different kinds of edible gummies when I was on vacation, and today, my first day off work since my return home, I'm experimenting.

I'm on drugs!!!!!!

I know what you're thinking: "Hmm. But he seems about the same as ever."

Seems that way to me too.

In the morning just after breakfast I took a 5 milligram gummi of Delta 9 thc. That's the stuff that gets you high. It was a pretty modest dose. It also had a lot of cbd oil (also derived from hemp but not psychoactive) which can somewhat inhibit the brain's uptake of thc. After two hours nothing had happened. Then I felt a susurration of pleasant heaviness. I would describe myself as barely high and kinda cozy. Also my back didn't hurt, which it usually does, partly because I think I was a little bit less tense than I usually am. Was it like I remembered being high was, back in my smoking youth? No, it was as much like being gently toasted on a medium to large glass of wine as any of that, but it was very nice.

Anyway, all of this didn't last too long, maybe a couple hours where I could really say I felt it.

So a bit less than an hour ago I took another brand of 5 mg gummi, this one without, as far as I can tell, any cbd in it.

I am so high!!!

No, just kidding. I am really not sure if I could write anything here if I were really high. 

I'm figuring since the first gummi took a couple hours to have an effect I have a bit more time to go here to see if anything much kicks in. Once upon a time Grape and I took dangerous amounts of Peyote in a beautiful natural area for bats in a bit of canyon near Grape's parents' house. We gave up after a couple hours that it would ever have any effect, and then we went bowling.

At which point we went out of our minds. 

It was a little intense and a something of a waste, washing us up in our respective parent's homes later in the evening to let us just burn it all off.  Grape did see a sepulchral figure on the side of the road while my brother drove us through some canyons before that though.

It is now exactly an hour since I took the second gummi. 

I will say this: It isn't much like in those Hunter S. Thompson novels, I mean memoirs, where he sees giant lizard people gulping down cocktails in lurid Las Vegas bars.

"Wait," You say. "While we wait for the giant lizard people to kick in, and for you to be unable to write, why don't you give us the fourth part of your summer reading adventure where you talk about the books you read, or the ones you skimmed and tossed aside on your vacation. We so enjoyed, for instance, your discussion of the book Wilding!"

"Great idea." I reply. "But I might get high at any moment so I'm leery of starting in on it." I pause, thinking. "You seem to be doing an increasing amount of heavy lifting on this blogpost though. Do you think maybe you could write part four of my posts about my vacation reading? You're very good with words!"

"Really? Thank you!" You say, blushing slightly at the unexpected compliment. "I could try. Let me consult my notes."

There is a long pause. 

You don't realize that you are on the air. 

And we are just waiting for your response.

I gesticulate to get your attention:

KFHJH ANPW498QICVPY489UF4CJQ!!!!!!!!

"Oh. Sorry." You say. "I didn't realize that this all happened in real time." You look down at some papers. "Can I get back to you tomorrow?"

"Absolutely." I say positively. 

It turns out that I am pretty sure this is a long enough blog post as is.

Gabe's Birthday

 

Among the many holidays we celebrate here at this blog, which is called Life is a Fountain or Clerkmanifesto, depending on how everyone is feeling, is Grape's Birthday. Sometimes we celebrate Grape's Birthday by writing a moving essay about Grape (here: an example that could lead to more examples if you like), and sometimes, especially if we're not entirely sure where Grape is and if he's reading along, we just decorate the blog real pretty like, put out some cake, and tell Grape we love him.

This year we also sent Grape 57 postcards!

57!

You have a lot of questions?

Would you like a FAQ on Grape's 57 postcards?

Okay.

Grape's Birthday Postcards FAQ

Why did you choose 57 as a number of postcards?

No reason at all. It was an entirely random number for a person in his late fifties.

57 seems like a lot. Are you sure it wasn't more like twenty?

No.

What kinds of things did you say in your 20-57 Postcards?

Mostly "Happy Birthday". Other than that it was an awful lot like this FAQ when it came to the content.

What can I do to have my birthday celebrated here every year?

I don't know. Ask?

How can I wish Grape a happy birthday?

Just your asking will be taken as wishes.

And now lets sing together. Everybody choose your favorite tune (don't worry, I'll take care of the royalties on the copyrighted lyrics):

Happy Birthday to Grape,

On this day in October,

We're so happy you're older, 

And not dead. So...

Happy Birthday to Grape!

Decorative seasonal picture follows:

Work injury

 

I was heading into one last quiet evening of work before a five day vacation involving Memorial Day and a possibly injudicious use of precious vacation time. Then it happened. From out of nowhere. A paper cut.

"AAAARRRRGHGHGHGGGHHHHHHHH!" 

I screamed. Except I did it in a quiet, dignified way that looked more like this:

"Oh. Shoot."

Then I tried to make it bleed. It almost did. I mean, it was red, and it welled up a little, but not enough to form a drop or blottable amount of blood.

The cut goes right over the top knuckle on the back of my left thumb. I immediately visited every person who was available in the whole library:

A co-worker:

"Oh no! My beautiful vacation will be ruined by my horrible paper cut!" I exclaimed.

My bosses in their office:

"I got a paper cut! We need to fill out an incident report in case I lose my thumb!"

Then I went to the front desk to help people:

"Before I help you," I warned the library patrons. "I have to tell you that I got a paper cut, so my service won't be as good as usual."

They were willing to risk it.

Then it got quiet so I texted Grape:

"This represents the horrible pain of my paper cut" I wrote, and then I included this picture I had taken:

Then, finally, I sat down and wrote all about it in my blog, clerkmanifesto.

That's what you're reading.

And only now, finally, it doesn't hurt anymore.

Txtng

 

Today I am here to sing the praises of texting!

I never thought I would like texting. But now that I have a phone I am surprisingly fond of it. It has connected me with old friends in a way that all the pseudo magical garbage of the Internet never quite did. I think it might be the low floor of quality it requires. I'm so tired of all this quality. Not everything can be as good as this blog you're reading!  I need a super low point of entry. Writing Grape an email always demanded coherent sentences, or a reason for a message. Texting is not like that. Texting is free. Texting is 'it's the thought that counts' because anything more significant requires tedious thumbwork. 

Watch, I'll text him now:

Oh, right, I don't have a way to show you my text.

Maybe if you gave me your number I could text it?

The point is though, that I texted him. It took four seconds, and much like sending my other friend Jim a picture of cheese at a grocery store, it was the thought that counted. And I barely even had to think the thought! I didn't worry if they liked it. I am not waiting for a response. I require no thanks. It was merely a microsecond of hanging out on my terms. I don't really have a lot of minutes or hours or days or years I am keen to bandy about, but microseconds? I'm still willing to spend microseconds freely.

Sure, seize the moment! Live for today. Reach for the stars. But there's plenty of time for a text first: 

Hey friend, am reaching for stars now.

October 23, a history, a joke, and Grape

 

On October 23rd this blog celebrates the birthday of longtime blog (and personal) friend Grape! We have been doing this for a long time. We do it because:

1. He is our very oldest friend.

2. It is a fun way to share zany stories of youthful hijinks.

3. He is a robust blog commentator!

4. Our dates of birth are only four days apart so it's all part of the grand festivities!

5. We like him.

This year we are going to do a little lookback at what we have covered in this blog on Grape birthdays gone by so that we know where we are in the mythosphere of our history as we go forward.

So far we have written at length about our various following adventures and misadventures:

1. The time we went swimming (accidentally) with hundreds of sharks!

2. The time we took massive amounts of one of the most powerful hallucinogens in the World, peyote, in some bat caves in the Southern California hills, but they didn't work, so we gave up and went bowling. Then they worked. They worked a lot!

3. The Summer we became obsessed with Miniature Golf and reinvented the sport for the ages.

4. The time we saw a herd of magic deer in the most beautiful valley in all of the High Sierras, and a rainbow formed over them, and then lightning struck behind them.

5. The time we almost died while reckless driving down Stunt Canyon Rd.

6. The time we put a rattlesnake in his mom's freezer, then dissected it in the bathroom on a sweltering Summer day as his family became increasingly suspicious.

7. The time we lit a fire while backpacking into the Mountains only to find it still burning when we were backpacking out.

8. The terrible bear and horse encounter of 1982!

That is a whole lot of events to have already covered in this blog!

This is a very old blog to have covered so much on merely a once a year basis!

All of this makes clerkmanifesto a super, impressively old blog.

But not as impressively old as me and Grape! 

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

So happy birthday to Grape!

And check this out, now that photos are legal on clerkmanifesto, I present to you...

Grape:

Note: Grape is a children's book author who wrote the book "Grape"!

Note to Grape: The above photo would make an excellent author photo for the sequel to Grape that's coming out next year.

Gelato of Florence

We've spent a couple days leading up to this survey of the gelato of Florence. The cat's already out of the bag as regards to the best gelateria in Florence; Dei Neri. And as much as one might like to be the great gelato sleuth of Florence, ferreting out some miraculous hidden gem, the fact is that if, from my research, I had to guess what would have been the best gelateria in Florence I would have guessed Dei Neri.

This is not bad news! Dei Neri is centrally located, easy to get to, and never, as far as I can tell, besieged by any serious lines. If you want just one gelato in Florence, go to Dei Neri, and if you want to experiment, start with Dei Neri. Simple.

But the other good news is that all these runner up finishers to Dei Neri are so close in quality to Dei Neri that it's just not that big a deal, unless you're an absolute gelato fanatic, to miss Dei Neri and instead end up at them, mostly. Especially towards the top of my list.

Which brings me to my ranked list of Florentine gelaterias:


1. Dei Neri

The best flavor I had was coffee, which, unlike any coffee gelato or ice cream I've ever had, both tasted exactly like coffee and tasted better than coffee, both true to coffee, and the ideal of coffee. They had one of the best pistachios I've had here too, matching Come il Latte's remarkable version in Rome.  Once I got a four flavor cup all of fruit flavors, raspberry, passion fruit, mango, maybe clementine? All the flavors were reliably pure and straight from the fruit, the gelato fresh and impeccably smooth, and the sweetness quietly pitched.


2. Della Passera (tied)

A sweet little place in the Oltrarno (but not the far away Oltrarno like the one it's tied with, more just across the river from the main parts of Florence). I had a two-flavor cup of clementine and vanilla and the clementine was an eye opener, fresh, sparkling like a really good clementine, and the vanilla was a smooth perfect foil. I wish I could have tried more from here, but this was so nice and felt so right!


2. Pintucci (tied)

Here, alas, is the wonderful gelateria pitched maybe a bit too far from the center of town and from where most travelers will be to be worth the extra trip. As a reader of gelateria reviews and blog posts I find these kinds of places particularly irksome as they're immensely interesting to me, but usually, in the end, not quite worth the very specific journey. So for you I'm glad this wasn't the very best of all gelato, per se, even if it was fantastic. That it was fantastic was great because my lovely wife, who so kindly indulged my frequent gelato diversions, and I just so happened to be staying out here for part of our trip, just beyond the Porta Romana. I had a lot of gelato here! The flavors were very pure and only the slightest step off of Dei Neri. The high water mark for them was the best hazelnut I've ever had. It was brilliant. It tasted like, get this, hazelnuts! They had a really good passion fruit here too.


4. Strega Nocciola

They have a couple locations here, one practically on the river in Oltrarno, and another just off the Duomo. They also have one of these in Rome, in the Spanish Steps neighborhood, which is where I first encountered them and the utter glory of their lavender gelato. I tried their bright, brilliant strawberry this time around too. This is my fourth best in Florence and I'm still splitting hairs really. If you only had gelato here and nowhere else you won't really have missed anything. This is amazing gelato.


5. Perche No, Eduardo, and Sbrino (a three way tie for fifth)

Any city would be proud to host any of these gelaterias and there would be awfully few of those cities wherein any one of the above wouldn't be the absolute best ice cream of any kind in the city. 

Perche No is maybe the most famous of the Florence gelaterias and I found their chestnut fascinating, hazelnut extremely close to Pintucci's above, and their caramel delicious but short of amazing. As with any singular visit to a place as good as this I can only wonder if, in a different mood, or having chosen different flavors, I might be ranking them even higher than my already high regard.

Sbrino I don't have to wonder about all that with Sbrino as it was small, charming, and also (maybe unfortunately for you) out across the street from Pintucci, in the distant Oltrarno, so I did a more thorough survey of their gelato. Their quality was unmistakable, most compellingly in a rather amazing Fior Di Capra, which was a plain goat milk gelato. Don't knock it til you try it. Grape with all the skin bits in didn't quite work, and a signature flavor with maybe hazelnut and white chocolate was good but not as good as it sounds. Nevertheless I kept pulling for the place, and when they got it they really got it.

Eduardo, right on the Duomo, was, well, my notes fail me! Sorry. I loved it but cannot for the life of me remember anything about it. There goes the curse of eating too much fantastic gelato!

Grapesongs

To my delight, as I have begun compiling a list of the hundred greatest albums ever (being 100 albums that are in and of themselves the single greatest album ever made), my choices have leaned slightly more... obscure. Oh, not wildly obscure, Dylan, Neil Young, and Miles Davis are all there, but it's not the notable things like Blood on the Tracks, or Harvest, yet (though it is Kind of Blue). And Lucinda Williams has appeared, along with the maybe not wildly known Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. This has not been by design. It just worked out that way. So it's a nice learning experience for everyone, albeit one without serious challenges.

Until today!

You cannot hear this album. It is not commercially available. It never made the radio. There are no YouTubes of it. I can't link it for you. You have not heard it. You probably never will.

My friend made it, like, 25 years ago! 

Go ask him for it.

Because it is the greatest album ever.

Seriously.

Today is my friend Grape's birthday. I like to say a thing or two about him here on that day. But I won't cheat. I have written before in this space about Grapesongs. Grapesongs is not gratuitously included. It would make its way to my list regardless of dates. I doubt anyway it will do any favors to my friend. My 20 regular readers won't be catapulting Grape to fame. Grape has a middle reader book that just came out that I quite like, called, get this, Grape, and I'm sure he'd be far more keen in anyone's interest in that over some ancient foray he took into singer/songwriter glory. I don't even know if he can play the guitar anymore. It's history. Maybe it's just an old dream to my friend now, curious, a mysterious disappointment he made peace with.

But when I get tired of using my own blog as the poster child of everything wrong with the Capitalist winner-takes-all art system, of the stupid Internet that managed to shock everyone by being even more hostile to art than the world it replaced, there is always Grape and his lovely masterpiece of an album, never published, sitting in my family's music drawer to bear the brunt of our cultural disasters. Let it stand for all the things unsung, to marketing over content, to the quiet way that the best things in life are not destiny, they are moon shots and prayers in the dark. They are triumphs one at a time.

Like in my heart.

One is enough, isn't it?

Because this is a beautiful album.

It is a serendipity for me to realize, hey, I can include this album on Grape's birthday. But it is not disingenuous or convenient. I sing these songs all the time, to this day. More than 20 years on I will wake up with these songs. I live my life with this soundtrack. Witness I Can't hide is as part of my consciousness, elevating, informing, leavening, as much as, say Homeward Bound, or Oh Very Young. 

"Just come and walk with me. It ain't so heavy when we talk it through." 

That's all I'm doing with this blog.

Turkey Vultures in repose

I recently promised in this space 600 blog posts about Turkey Vultures. Many of my readers were tremendously excited. Grape, a very old and dear friend sometimes mentioned in this blog, even wrote a comment in favor of Turkey Vulture writing! I haven't heard from Grape in months (though fairly speaking he hasn't heard from me either), so to hear from him on the subject of Turkey Vultures must mean he is especially enthusiastic about them! And he could be merely the tip of the iceberg Turkey Vulture-interest-wise.

So this morning I resolved to write about Turkey Vultures!

But great nature writers like myself and Edward Abbey and Mark Twain and Emily Dickinson and myself and Farley Mowat and John Muir and, wait, did I mention myself? well, we need to see nature in action in order to write our fascinating natural world material. So I had to go out to walk along the river to collect Turkey Vulture insights, anecdotes, and raw materials. My keen, tireless, and fearless observations of the Natural World would fuel an engaging bring-it-to-life prose that would briefly stem the relentless hunger out there for more and more and yet ever more lucid descriptions of soaring, red-headed Turkey Vultures, and finally I could take a break from writing about them, which I have now done in, let's see, roughly zero blog posts.

But the problem was that it was cold and rainy this morning. And, what with it being a rare day off from work for me, I refused to get dressed. I looked out the window instead. And there were clouds. There were things falling from trees. There were some ducks. I saw a hawk flying low over an unused golf course. But there were no Turkey Vultures. 

They stayed home too! 

They're probably there right now, in their little jammies.

Though for scientific purposes I should note this last part is just speculation.

The Grape retrospective

Traditionally on clerkmanifesto we celebrate my friend's, Grape's, birthday on this day, October 23rd. I best like to celebrate it with a story from our past. But I've been doing this for a long time, so a lot of the key stories have been covered. Let us review:

1. Grape saves my life.

2. Grape almost kills me.

3. We dissect a rattlesnake.

4. We swim with a hundred sharks.

5. We hide in a tent in the John Muir Wilderness while it never stops raining and eat peanut butter, drink whiskey, and read just enough of Rimbaud's Season in Hell so that we can say we did.

6. We eat far too much Peyote, see a spectral apparition (some of us do), and then sit around alone in the suburbs, all our spirituality thwarted.

I still blame the spectral apparition for that.


Fortunately there are a few stories left to work with, but since I have been writing about golf so much these days I have decided I will tell you about the Summer of Mini-Golf.

It might not be a very good story, but it was a very fun Summer. Maybe mostly because it was during a not very happy time in my life.

I was living at my parents' home, kind of paralyzed there with self hatred and despair, lost, when Grape came back for Summer Vacation from College.

"Let's go miniature golfing." He said.

So we did. Constantly. I think there was a nice course near where he was staying. We golfed. Not only are we very competitive, but we tend to think a lot of games can be improved. In our many hours out on the links (Hah!) we were no longer satisfied with 54 or 108 holes of "normal" mini golf. What about timed holes? What about playing a hole pool style? What about designated paths through the holes that gave them pars that would more suitably be set at 15 or 16. We played speed golf, kick golf, hit the other guy's golf ball golf, and closest to the hole golf. I like to think we got pretty good at it.

Of course the trick with stuff like that is that even though it seems absurd, one has to take it seriously. We quite liked to compete. We quite liked to win. We took it very seriously.

I'm just saying I have not much golfed, but out on those mini golf courses, I learned that all that fresh air can be ennobling, and diverting, and spiritual, and fun. Even if mainly we were running around hooting or lying on our bellies or something.

It might have been another year or two before I found my way out of the dead end I thought I'd be in forever, but I think Grape and all that golfing helped.

Which brings me back to item number one in the list of previous memoirs: Grape saves my life, which I think a wide assortment of these old stories tend to be about, even if just a little. Even the one where he almost killed me (and himself). 

I suppose, at its best, that's what friendship does.

So happy birthday Grape. Thanks for life.

Grape's birthday keeps coming

As is our tradition here on Clerkmanifesto we celebrate October 23 as the birthday of Grape.

Why do we do this?

Um, because October 23 is Grape's birthday, so then, that would be the time...

No, no, why do we do this?

Oh. the answer to "why" is ever in the blogposts. Here are two answers:

(one)

(two)

And now I offer another. But first I must say that if there are an infinity of October 23rds to come, well then, surely there is an infinity of answers. 

For this birthday: The rattlesnake.

Oh the rattlesnake. Back in the early 1980's there were rattlesnakes. These are warm weather snakes who lay coiled in the day and hunt at night. Peaceable unless surprised, threatened, or hungry, they have a rattle at the end of their tail that they shake when alarmed and two poisoned fangs up at their very front that they will stab into anyone they feel they would prefer to be dead. What a creature, a creature out of a fable! 

I wish there were still rattlesnakes.

In those days Grape and I often drove to the top of Stunt Canyon Road and then took the short boulder-hopping walk to the peak of the wee Mountain there, Stunt Mountain, where one could see the Pacific Ocean and The San Fernando Valley both, great hills of chaparral rolling away heedlessly, improbable houses dotting the hillsides dangerously, and skies smeared with dry white clouds by day and strange gouts of shooting stars at night. What did we do there? Well, we went there and that was enough. It is hard to work out how such young men could be so sensible. It was not native to us.

One day driving down from the peak we saw a snake coiled in the road. We pulled off to the side. We debated for a very long time as to whether said snake was dead or alive. Then we got a stick.

What was this stick? Neither of us were keen on being bitten by a rattlesnake, and we both of us suffer from Imaginations. So we did not grab a stick, no. We grabbed a branch, fifteen feet long. No, we grabbed an oak tree, and we said hello with it to the snake, to see what the snake wanted to do.

The snake wanted to be in snake heaven forever. 

So we took his body home.

At Grape's house we were out of time for the day. So we found some tupperware, and we put the snake in it in his family garage freezer. And we put notes on it that said something like "You probably don't want to check into what this is or you will be even more worried about your favorite child than you already are."

Yes, I'm afraid Grape was both his parents' favorite child and I say that merely to call it as I see it, nevertheless hoping Rubin, Eli, and Alisa, the siblings of Grape, aren't reading this. And if they are that they have either made peace or know better than me that I am wrong.



It is a hot day on the edge of the Valley. I am at Grape's family house. For some reason a multitude of his Grandparents are visiting, maybe some from Argentina, some from Israel. With the strange judgement of, well, us, we decided this was the correct time to take the snake out of the freezer and cut it apart.

So we did. In the hall bathroom.

I remember so little of this. Like, strangely the dissection was immaculate, bloodless, and easy, despite our total lack of facility and experience with such things. But it must have taken a long time because ever was Grape's mother knocking at the door. "What are you doing in there?" She asked.

I may be making this up, but I think we must have finally answered "Dissecting a rattlesnake."

With an assortment of knives we carefully removed the fangs. One for each of us. I sent my fang to the woman of my dreams. Perhaps this was the exact right thing to do because, after all, my dreams came true. I don't know what Grape did with his fang. What did you do with your fang, Grape?

We skinned the snake and packed that meaty skin away for later. I ended up curing it with salt, nailed to a board, at my house. We would have shared that stiff skin, I am guessing, but our family dog Cashew chewed it all up one day soon after. Yum, salty!

In the end the pressures of people needing the bathroom and the growing smell of warm snake on a hot day led us to wrap things up. We cleaned up, gathered our chosen and still to be worked on parts, and decided to share the rattle. Grape and I share the rattle.

Back and forth it went between us. Or it still does. Grape sent it once in an aluminum can. I made a golden apple for it. It's been in jewel cases and miles of Styrofoam, pill bottles and things I will never remember again. Where is it now?

I don't know. I have this feeling that I might have it somewhere down here in my basement. If so I should send it on to Grape. If not he will probably send it along to me. But really where is it now? The rattle is faded, a ghost.

Now the dream rattle is more real than the original work of nature. Now the rattle is in my heart. It's part of how my heart is made. Aren't we just packed together out of things like this? There's a rattlesnake rattle in my heart.

And that is how we observe Grape's birthday.

What we have learned

As I prepare to travel to Paris I find myself needing to come up with a dozen or so ahead of time blog posts. After I write them I set them up to dispense one a day while I'm gone. And then the only difference between when I'm home, working and diligently writing posts daily, and this scheme is... well, there isn't any difference. Sometimes my blog just works like that naturally anyway. To you this blog may be the steadiest of metronomes, but to me fecundity comes and goes and I just have to make sure it averages out okay.

But it is a little different when I have to write a dozen, or two dozen, or even three dozen blog posts to prepare for a trip. So in the past I have come up with devices to help me with this. Because none of these have gone well I would like to reminisce about them in the hopes that I can learn something.


1. Ghostwriter!

The only time this blog ever broke from my relentless authorship was in its first summer. I got my friend Grape to write it. He agreed to write three posts for my vacation. I was thinking, when I asked him, he would say "Oh my god, you want me to write? I am profoundly honored! Name any number." And I would have named, oh, fifteen, and then he would have written them and they would have been so good I would be super jealous and it would have eaten away at our friendship. So I guess he knew what he was doing.


2. Befores and afters.

On this trip I was going to a lake house we sometimes go to. I set up a lot of ahead of time questions about the trip for me to answer after. And I made elaborate reading lists and set them up to report back on them. I learned here that the questions I so eagerly have about an upcoming trip are not the ones I want to answer when I come back, and that if I take ten extremely interesting books with me I will discard nine of them out of contempt or boredom after less than two pages and yet will come across seven books randomly on the trip that I will read cover to cover.

3. The fake trip.

Last year we went away for five weeks, and I came up with an elaborate device. I wrote a day to day fictional anticipation of what my wife and I would be doing on that actual day of our trip. Sadly my account was too naturalistic and the whole thing confused many of my readers who thought this was an actual journal of the trip in real time. So when I got back no one wanted to hear about my trip because they had already read about it. When I explained that they had merely read a fictional version of my trip they were surprised, but, alas, they nevertheless felt satisfied with what they'd already read.




And so, what have we learned?


We have learned that I should probably write shorter posts because I still have, like eight to go!

We have also learned that learning is overrated.

I am, like, so Vishnu

I killed a rabbit.

I was driving home in my murdermobile when I came onto Highway 280. Note that it was a highway. I was traveling at about 50 mph when a rabbit leaped in front of my car. I don't know why. He was just beginning a relatively long journey across four lanes of roaring traffic when I hit him. One can surmise he wanted badly to die. But I might be looking for a way out from under all the... blood on my hands.

Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

Did I have time to put on brakes? I guess I could have slammed them, and if I did it quickly enough then the braking would have commenced meaninglessly just after my smearing of the small animal beneath my car. Could I have swerved? Only if I wanted to hit him better. The actual thought I had in the half second after the rabbit appeared in front of my car and the point of my bringing quick and ragged death to him was "Just don't panic, make sure the wheels don't hit him, and if he lies low..." I think I was on the lie low part when I felt the undercarriage of the car grab him by the ears, or back, or head, hideously hurl him to the ground, and bounce him bloodily between the car and the highway before leaving his pulped and ruined corpse behind me.

It's amazing how much one can feel from the seat of a car. Though I suppose it's nothing like what one can feel from the underside of a car.

I don't actually know how guilty to feel. Something turns in my stomach as I write. But do you want to know what's in my stomach as I write? Some ground up cow. How did that get there?

Grape, in my small but clear headed audience, raises his hand.

"Do you remember...?"

Oh, of course I remember Grape. That was always part of this story. You see, I was an accessory to a rabbit murder once before, many decades ago. Grape and I were driving home from a backpacking trip. Grape was driving. The sun was setting in the long California desert. A jackrabbit rushed the road. Grape did what he could, but, "kerpluckt", the wheel smushed the poor wee hopper. A stunned silence fell on we tired nature lovers. Grape was devastated. I felt probably exactly the same way as I do now at my own inadvertent rabbit murder, 30 years and the lifetimes of billions of rabbits later. We did not say much for awhile. That he could not avoid this accident was but little succor when we mused on it. We stopped for gas.

We went into the gas station. A devastated Grape said to the station clerk "I feel terrible. I just ran over a rabbit."

"Aw, man." The clerk replied "There's so many rabbits around here we go out shooting them for fun."

Well, I'll have you know there are quite a few rabbits around here in the spring too. Not that I was running that one over for fun.

I've eaten rabbit a couple times. Both of them were at very fancy restaurants. At no point was I wracked with guilt. It didn't occur to me to feel guilt. Though, considering it now, why not. Go ahead and feel a little guilt, all the storied chefs and rabbit ranchers and rabbit butchers in the world cannot strain out the fact that those rabbits deaths go on my account. Yes, somewhere there is a great heavenly (or hellish) list of all the animals we killed or caused to die.  Oh what a list. And to make one feel worse about it when one looks at the list the list doesn't say, like, "Mosquitoes: 18,265" No indeed. Each one is personally listed, with a name, like "Lucretia, Mosquito, 2 days old. She just had kids. She was happy."

How do they know she was happy? They know everything.

Speaking of driving deaths. Once I was driving home with my friend Matthew, across the Dakotas. We were beset by plagues on our way home. First were locusts. We had to use windshield wipers. They coated the front of the car. But that was nothing. The rains came, and then the frogs. Ah god, the frogs. For some reason they poured out onto the highway in countless thousands. "Thumpity, thumpitithumpitithump tump tump tum, pup pup pup." To drive was to kill them in the hundreds, maybe more. We pulled over. Look at all the frogs! Look at all the dead frogs we ran over. Should we just sit here forever by the side of the road? No. We drove on. If we drove slow we killed them slower for a long time. If we drove fast we killed them all at once, for miles and miles of murder. Hundreds of frogs. Thousands of frogs. All with names and written with blood on our souls.

So what is a mere rabbit to all those frogs?

Alas, plenty.

How we almost die

Once, long ago, I almost died. Most of us have had our run ins with death. Life is dangerous. In this long ago time my friend Grape and I half died, not in the sense of injury, but in the sense of a fifty-fifty chance. It could have gone either way, control was gone, on one side lay death and on the other life. But since one can't be half dead I am still all here. 

What if every time a chance at death came our way we died partly, like a cat losing one life out of its nine. It would only be fair though, since we are not cats and have but one life, that each portion would be in relation to what we have left: So if someone is already 50 percent dead, and a truck miraculously swerves to miss them, and it was a fifty-fifty shot, they lose half of the the 50 percent they have left and are now 75 percent dead. This results in them being able to see in the dark and causes their normal body temperature to drop ten degrees colder. On the down side of all this increased percentage of death one eventually sleeps almost all the time and shows no reflection in mirrors and is pale and faded. On the plus side no mere chance of death can kill us. We retain a fraction of life up until we encounter a 100 percent likelihood of death.

Maybe, though, there is no such thing as chance. If I had died that night it would have been 100 percent certain that I would have. Because I didn't I was always going to live without any possibility otherwise. 

Well, either way, here I am. That simple moment in a car, teetering on the brink, out on Stunt Canyon Road, is somehow finding its way to completely inform the great bulk of your reality at this moment. After all, you are reading this. I'm pretty sure you couldn't be here if I were dead.

Of course, Grape may be reading this, but it would be different for him. He was there, driving the car.

When we were still teenagers we would drive into the Santa Monica Mountains. That's what they're called. They're more like hills, but they're really nice hills. And somewhere a canyon road winds its way steeply up near the top of Stunt Peak, which is really just the top of a big hill. But it's a mighty big hill, with a good view. We liked to go there. From where the road ended you could walk up to the top of the highest rocks. You could see ocean and the San Fernando Valley both. It was a holy place. A place of calling. It was somewhere you could politely throw rocks, see snakes, and get stoned.

One day, on the way driving down from that peak Grape took one of those steep canyon curves kind of fast. The back wheels skidded. It was fun! So naturally, following that, at each vicious hairpin turn Grape would go kind of fast. We'd skid. It was very exciting! So Grape went a little faster on each turn, but it was all very steep, and it was kind of hard to control just how fast we were going. So the last time he did it the back wheels skidded and then they kept on skidding. Then the front wheels skidded. Then the whole car just slalomed about on its own, careening down the road. On one side was a rock and dirt embankment, on the other side was something that was for all intents and purposes a cliff. Even now I can see us down there at the bottom of it, the smoking ruin of a burning car, blood, the end of the world. 

We hit the embankment side. But you knew that.

I am not telling this story because I suddenly remembered our harrowing slide. I am telling it because for some reason I recently vividly remembered Grape calling his family from a public phone to report our accident. We modified the story to include a rock in the road. A big rock, well, pretty big. We might also, in the telling, have left out the roller coastery part, feeling it was a more of an optional detail that not everyone would handle as well as they should.

You might be thinking that Grape was not being such a good or responsible driver, but this never even occurred to me. I am merely thankful he somehow, through some measure of driving skill, managed to get us safely mashed into the side of Stunt Hill. 

We still had things to do. And even now, 34 years later, we have not done them all.

Grape's birthday

The question is asked:

Why on this blog do we celebrate Grape's Birthday every year despite regularly celebrating no other occasion?

I don't know.

So the question is asked:

How do we celebrate Grape's Birthday?

We're not sure. Like this?

And sometimes, I am guessing, even Grape asks:

Who is Grape?

That is an interesting question! Going from my own experience I bet Grape finds it a very interesting question.

And when there are enough people gathered here, which occasionally there are, a few people ask:

Why should I care about this Grape's Birthday when I don't even know this Grape person or much of anything about him?

And that's when I suggest we all sing him the birthday song before we get headed in entirely the wrong direction.




 

No secret to me

Each individual piece of art that has ever been made is uninteresting to most people.

It's a strange way to look at it, but accurate. I can easily wander around my workplace and find people who couldn't care less about Bob Dylan. Indeed, it's just a handful who do care. Van Gogh? Mary Oliver? Caravaggio? Ursula K. LeGuin? Drawing from a pool of 40 or so culturally involved library workers I can rest assured that we would get nowhere near a majority interest in any of those lions, and would do no better with anyone else. And no doubt the fractional percentages of interest we do get in, say, F. Scott Fitzgerald, would drop significantly in the backroom of a library in Indonesia.

Nothing made by the hand of man has been loved by most people. When it feels like everyone around you is fervently talking about Downton Abbey or Game of Thrones or Gone Girl, take a breath. Look around. It's just four excited people, loud in the way of people in a group, feeling the numbers on their side. Twenty people scattered around those four have busied themselves, trying to make a little space to breathe. They don't care. They love something else.

There is always something else.

This morning I woke up with a line from a song in my head. It's one of my favorite songs ever. Getting up has been so hard for me lately. Something about this song today helped me get up, this line:

Just don't make me go through this again.

And then as my eyes clear the song comes to me:

But oh, it's one more tune,
I can't figure out.
Just don't make me go through this again.

And I can wake up.

Who knows this song? It is not famous. My friend Grape wrote it.

I love it like I love Nowhere Man or Karma Police or River. It is not due to my personal relationship, to my great affection for the artist, though I have those. I just love it. We are free to pretend that that is a normal thing, because it is. Grape wrote a masterpiece. Masterpieces are not so rare, but that doesn't make them any less wonderful. The famous ones are the tip of an iceberg. Almost no one will ever see most of the ones that have been made, the thrown away manuscripts, burnt paintings, songs that were never recorded, books that couldn't sell their paltry 1000 print run and faded away, scribbled poems, transcendent home movies. There are millions and millions of them. They may or may not find more than a single person to love them, but the beauty and wonder and feeling they evoke in a single person cannot be diminished.

What makes art a viable commodity anyway? If two percent of an audience loves it we can make it business, but if only half a percent loves it we can never send it around. That's just money talking. That's just the disease of culture, the weakness even in the heart of democracy.

Here is your Internet. Here is your Publishing industry. Here is your library. Dig deeper, but you cannot get there. Much is buried. Most is lost. Have friends. Listen carefully. See the graffiti under the bridge. Hear the song in the cafe. It's all around you. 

It's no secret to me,
That what I'm missing,
Is the very thing I wanted out of life.

It's all around you. And all the wonder and heart, it's all yours alone.