My Identities

 

1. Writer 

2. Artist

3. Counselor 

4. Teacher

5. Traveler

6. Photographer

7. Dancer

8. Athlete

9. Thinker

10. Gambler 

11. Fortune- teller

12. Movie maker

13. Firewatcher

14. Lover

15. Reader

16. Singer

17. Director

18. Actor

19. Poet

20. Friend

21. Son

22. Brother 

22. Expat

23. Choreographer

24. Alcoholic 

25. Patient 

26. Event manager 

27. Babysitter

28. Bowling Alley Pinsetter

29. Janitor

30. Librarian

32. Bookseller 

33. Paper Boy

34. Surveyor Chainman

35. Cat lover

34. Corpse Pose sleeper

35. Dreamer

36. Grocery bagger

37. Stock clerk

38. Bottom feeder

THE 1%

 

The waters flow, carrying people away. Supposedly, 99% of the people born on the same day as mine gone. They say not to outlive your friends and I am finding that to be true, though I’m lucky and have a few younger ones left. Maybe they’ll remember my name for awhile.

That’s not as easy as it sounds. I have been trying to name some of the many who’ve passed by me: family, friends, co-workers, and acquaintances. A few remain lost in the well of time, though many I could recall and they still live in me.

I have always been haunted by the transitory, even if I feel very lucky to have come this far. It’s hard to be melancholy while the adventures have gone on for me, but loss is written on the waters, and they continue to flow by.

May all these who follow rest in peace.

Paul Pease 

Thais Pease

Henry Metcalf

Lulu Metcalf

Noah Mundt

Holly Barnett 

Michael Liss

Randy Beck

Laurie Beck

Berta Gardner

Robert Pfennig

Amina Agisheff

Clark Brown

Peter Jodaitus

Renate Moock

Lee Breuer

Louis Logan

Geert Hendricks 

Suzanne Monaco

Carianne Wrona

Ruth Maleczech

Ed McLaughlin

Bill Peters

Rudy Giscomb

Bert Kaplan

Dale Kinski 

Franz Cilensek

Bookseller

Norman Elarth

Joe Bisanyani

Bluffton boy

Little girlfriend

Cousin's wife

Brain tumor

Jim Dwyer 

Jesse Mills

John electronic 

Sri Dalton

Peter Tscherning

Walter Pease

Luzerne Pease

G&G Pease

George Hitchcock

Oaxaca, Mexico, September 22, 2023

T

Outfoxing depression

 

Hmm, last spring i made lists of advice,  techniques, as much practical stuff as i could find. I felt frustrated with all the mind manipulation: live in the present, be here now, empty your head of thoughts.  Maddening,  don't you think? So i looked for things i could actually do. 

And people came up with surprising stuff. Here are a few, including tap along your acupuncture meridians.

Stick your head in a bucket of cold water. 

I like the 'time warp', having an evening with drinks, clothes, pictures, old movies,  everything to put me in a particular moment in the past. A bath in memory. 

An easier one: 'listen to sad music'. I don't know why it works   but it does. I've been listening to cool jazz from the fifties.  It gives me the feeling life will go on and on.

Enthusiasms

 

Alas, i'm rummaging around in memory for something to light my fire! I've listed as many as I can remember off the top of my head. Unfortunately,  the one i feel most pleasure from is FINGERPAINTING in the second grade. Doesn't seem a fit occupation for a man of a certain age. 🤔 Looks like I'll have to sit with the record for awhile. Wish me luck.

PICTURE BOOKS

SKATING IN THE WOODS 

MAKING AN IGLOO

FINGERPAINTING (2ND GRADE

WINNIE THE POO

SCOUTS

BASEBALL

PLAYING IN THE SNOW 

KICK THE CAN

POOL

SWIMMING 

GIRLS

WOMEN 

DANCING

MARBLES 

PHOTOGRAPHY 

POETRY 

TRAINS

TRAVEL

ART

THEATER

MOVIES

BUTTONS

BOOKS -READING

STORIES - MINE AND OTHERS

SLEEPING 

WALKING

FRIENDS 

MOUNTAINS

OCEAN -BEACHES

BOATS

TAROT

SHAMANISM

MONEY (TO LIVE)

HEALTH

COVID

MUSIC,  LATELY  COOL JAZZ

DAYDREAMING 

LOOKOUTS 

LEARNING

PHONE! COMPUTER 

INDIA

JAPAN

RUSSIA

XMAS

LAUGHTER (COMEDY)

PAST LIVES 

PSYCHICS 

COUNCILORS 

SUICIDE

WATERCOLOR 

MYSELF!!

DRIVING 

AMERICAN INDIANS 

MUSEUMS

EATING

SEX

ICE CREAM 

BREAD AND CHEESE 

ALCOHOL

IF ONLY I HAD A REPUTATION TO RISK

 

Tonight I'm going to risk my reputation as a rational person. I am working out of many past lives. I know this is a theory for most people, but I think for me it's an actual holiday.

The 1st psychic I went to, Gloria Sax, gave me a whole list of past lives. I wrote off a bunch of them. They were the usual kings and queens and all that kind of stuff, but she gave me some very specific ones that have stuck in my mind ever since.

Number one she said I was a scientist on Atlantis who helped develop the power that blew up the island. I had seen many people die. Then, let's see, there was another one. An American Indian one where I was a counselor and chief, a spiritual leader. And after there was a dark one. a kind of evil shaman type and that I had never worked those evil deeds out. And the last one was...

Those may have been the only ones I remember

I thought it had one more but anyway my point is that in this lifetime I have gone through periods of being obsessed with shamanism , with American Indians and and maybe with destruction which would fit with Atlantis and the end of the world kind of feeling, my shadow.

For more recent recent times I really think that my interest in Russia and the revolution probably comes out of a lifetime where I died in that particular revolution. And I don't know if I feel like I'm Jewish now but I have a lot of Jewish friends and our family did visit the concentration camps. I had done research on those. So these are all things that are very familiar for more recent lifetimes.

I'm thinking now , well, maybe I'll get another chance after this once I'm out. I'll come back as quick as I can and get involved in the the results of global warming and all the turmoil, whatever happens. If we have a Virus that kills off almost everybody and I'm left with The Leftovers, very much the theme as in STATION ELEVEN, a novel by Jill St. John.

What I like about this for myself is that I may get another chance. I am living out this lifetime enjoying myself. Gloria said and several more psychics said the same thing: in this lifetime I'm meant to take it easy in the sense of not accepting a lot of responsibility and authority. And it's definitely been the case. I haven't had a family I haven't had to be a father figure and I haven't had a career where I've had to supervise a lot of people, in fact I've hidden out on top of the mountain. The whole thing of looking for fires may come from Atlantis and blowing a place up, a premonition of the future.

I know this sounds kind of nutty. I don't pretend to be any kind of Indian Hindu guru type. I Like the literature but the the numerology and all that kind of stuff doesn't appeal to me, though it might come in handy building destructive weapons.

What am I saying tonight? I'm saying that there's probably no reason I should be depressed. It's true I have had a lot of depressing experiences both in past lifetimes and this lifetime.

But if I get another chance then there's no worries, there's no sense it's over, that I can't do anything, that I can't rectify my mistakes in this lifetime.

I don't have any real conclusions to make as far as other people go. I can only say that this feels right for me. I can justify my feelings through my experiences, my interests, and my travels. Being born into a religious family might be also part of this in order to have that extra dimension, which everybody's looking for and which everybody finds in other ways. Past lives are not in the stars or the Accepted standard of the moment.

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FALLING FALLING FALLING

 Can I write a blog by talking? Here's a chance to find out. FALLING, FALLING, FALLING. I have fallen, six, seven times on this trip. First, in the airport in Brasilia, in Brazil. I don't know what I was doing, I twisted around with my luggage and actually a few minutes earlier I had lost my phone and I was fit to be tied. A guard found it, tangled up in the luggage carriage that I had used. So I was obviously not in the best of the frame of mind. When I fell like it was on a rug. I did spread a lot chocolate chips all over the place.

Since then, in Oaxaca have now fallen six times. The first two times were simply careless. One I was taking pictures near a little park and I tripped on a curb, I thought I could make it. And I didn't. Smacked my face in cement on the left side. I had a black eye and a goose egg, and I lay there. Well, a guy came up and said okay, just don't do anything and we'll call a Medico, And of course I was bleeding onto the sidewalk. A woman handed me some Kleenex to wipe up the blood, and I sat down on the curb, and waited for a while and nobody showed up. So I decided to hell with it. I'm going to go ahead and go back to the hostel. And I was able to find it on the phone with the map.

Second time I was just outside my room, and there's a kind of airway, right next to it, and I had dropped something from for my window and so I stepped down but I miscalculated and fell right on my head again against the cement. Luckily only my hip was aching, and that was the same left as before.

The next four times were actually in my room. And they were from dizziness. I tried some supplements from Mexico, supposedly to help with the virus, or anti virus, anyway. And they made me dizzy as hell. So in the middle of the night. I fell at least two times. Once right on my pee can, so I had piss all over my room and I had to clean it up at two in the morning, and I did it one more time, and the same kind of thing. I had to clean pee up at two in the morning.

And then I had two more times. One was in the room, and didn't seem to do much damage except it skinned the hell out of my left elbow. The next time it happened was in the coffee shop where I go. I bent down to pick some postcards off the shelf. And when I stood up too quick, I passed out, and I didn't actually realize I fell until some guy came up to me, an American guy and said, Are you alright. Damn, I had passed out again. So, this is getting to be

monotonous and not very healthy.

I did read once years ago that after 65. You will fall. And I don't know how often that means, but it's how people break their hips. Of course I hit my hip. Every time my left hip, and it didn't break, but it's still sore right now. Now the only time I had this kind of occurrence was probably about eight years ago. I increased my dose of Prozac. And that made me feel very good, but it also made me careless.

Now one thing I know is that you cannot, it is impossible to multitask. And if you are trying to multitask, you're getting in the way of yourself. You can only do one thing after the other. So be really careful when you're stepping, when you're walking to do one thing at a time. Climbing a ladder, don't be thinking about a girlfriend or whether you want to fly, or hat you're going to paint. Just don't do it. And if you're driving a car, you may zone out. I can probably can still exist with that. But at some point when I get older I will not be able to zone out and keep control of the car, and that's why people have to stop driving at a certain age.

Now, at 81 I thought I would not live this long, and I wasn't planning on living longer than this. I came into Mexico and I thought, well this would be the end of it, but I just keep on going. So, I don't know exactly what's going to finish me off. As long as I don't start drinking and step in front of a car, hopefully I will be okay. But the sidewalks here are treacherous, the motorcycles run up and down the streets like crazy, and they go around cars so you don't necessarily see them. So this is my warning to me that I had better watch my step. Okay, falling, falling, falling, just like Alice down the rabbit hole.

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Too old to die young

 

 I’ve often said, “Don’t outlive your own life,” thinking i knew what it meant. Now I’m befuddled. Does it mean, don’t live past your physical capabilities or something else? It could mean, don’t outlive your friends, which would be a wise thought or, if circumstances change and you can’t change with them, abandon all hope. This morning I’m thinking it means, don’t outlive your curiosity. 

If i find the day dull and colorless, is it merely temporary, or a suggestion of something deeper? For example, after being in Oaxaca for four months, the bloom has worn off. At first, everything interested me. I took pictures of art, handicrafts, walked all over town looking at the murals. Observed people with appreciation, clicking photographs at every turn, not always getting smiles. These folks seemed vital, fresh, and not like the dull citizens at home. 

Alas, the day has come when i see protruding stomachs and dirty fingernails, obesity an immense problem, probably due to the sugar in all the pastries. For a long time the noise in the street sounded refreshing. With time it’s become abrasive and the crowds pushy. With everybody wearing masks it’s hard to realize how beautiful so many of women are. I’ve even had flashes of homesickness, despite the fact i have no desire to be there. Small wonder i meet so many nomads who keep moving.

Yes, I’ve met many who’ve been on the road for years, traveling dozens, even hundreds of countries. How do they do it? They don’t become attached to places or people. They can say hello and goodbye  easily. That’s how pilgrims have always done it. The movement itself is sacred. True, i don’t see many on a spiritual quest. Most like seeing themselves in exotic places. The lands around them scenes for their own rolling movies. Others like the feeling of being in motion, riding a bicycle, staring out a bus window, the the foreign smells roiling their hair.

I myself am attached to visual spectacle, constantly looking for the odd details, excited by the tilt of unusual looking buildings, colorful clothes flashing the the sun, old buses painted with slogans. I get used to sights and smells and they begin to bore me. I have to climb on a airplane and seek a contrast. And yet, i am really a person of attachments. I begin to yearn for familiar voices and faces.  Even the electronics of this age can’t bring me the flavor of a friend or the crunching of a known street under my feet. I am certainly a failed wanderer, though i like to play the part. 

Bums, beggars, and layabouts

Alas, alack, I’ve discovered another lethal strain of Puritanism in myself: i believe a person must make a contribution to the common good. I think mostly in terms of beauty, creativity, and art. That’s awfully narrow. It leaves out caregivers, policemen, garbage collectors and the great mass of people. What about parents loving their children or bill-collectors being kind? Every kind of giving might be considered essential.

Yet the other day I discovered a distain in myself. I met a young beggar from Kentucky displaying the sign I LOVE TACOS AND MEZCAL. He usually had a sign MONEDA PAR UN CUARTO. Yes, he asked the Mexican passerby to pay his hotel bill, and he’s remarkably successful. The general Mexican citizen has allowed him to travel all over México without a dime, and he’s been doing this for years. A young American begging succor from his Mexican hosts.

Now he is very charming, a good talker, his Spanish good enough to cage a ride to the coast, where he resides now. Friends at the hostel lauded this as courage. HE’S CHOSEN HIS LIFE. And i demurred without saying why. I didn’t want to admit a traveler needs to pay his way somehow, whether he’s in the depths of the tropics or on skid row. I’m an ardent fan of street singers and performers. Anyone can learn a few tunes on a harmonica or strum simple chords on a ukulele and belt out a song.

Skill is not the question here, though I’m inclined to give more money to the more

tuneful. Yes, i always give money to street musicians. Fifty cents to a dollar. I receive their thanks with magnanimity, or i smile as they merely plunk away without looking up. They’ve the pride of their profession. Any artist with any salt does. I like artists who draw on the sidewalk, those who yank and bop at puppets, jump through hoops, mangle a dance routine.

I don’t tolerate fakes however. There’s a guy on the streets of Oaxaca who carries a bronze soprano sax and sits with his son. He’ll play three notes, sit and wait, play the same three notes again. I want to throw a ten peso note at his head. A jerk like this spoils the whole scene. Luckily, he’s the only one. There is a young violinist who plays badly, but i encourage him with a few coins and he gives me a big smile. I want to encourage him till he plays at Carnegie hall!

Retirement: the land beyond time

 

I swore i would never retire. Ah, but at 80 maybe it’s a different story. Like all my friends who have retired i would have to find a new life. My identity as a fire lookout has served me well. It astounds the common crowd ho believe fire lookouts disappeared long ago. And it confuses foreigners who find the very concept bizarre, belonging only to Tibetan and Chinese monks. Other than in the quest for enlightenment, why would anyone sit on a mountain top, alone for months at  a time?

Now, i never dreamed i might live on social security and savings. Until i discovered i could in Mexico. And more than that, Mexico has revealed the deadness of life in the USA. By than i mean, in my home town the streets are empty. People drive the block to the corner grocery. At the most they walk their dog around the block. In Mexico, where there are only small shops, the sidewalks are full most all day. There are common markets with many food stalls and places to eat. 

Maybe it’s the difference between Catholic and Protestant, the churches of the former crowded with saints and paintings, the churches of the latter almost totally lacking in color. The Protestants believe in individual salvation, the souls of others left to make their own way. The Catholics extremely social and community driven. You can get to heaven by helping others. Of course, there is a price to pay. The dogma driven into little kids with a hammer. It’s truly tribal. 

Expats don’t have to abide by these rules and can live appreciating the bright colors  and peaceful parks. Street musicians appear everywhere, not driven into oblivion by rules saying you can’t sit on the sidewalk or raise your solitary voice in song. True, the language is foreign. And I’ve barely exerted myself in that direction, feeling I’ll be dead before i could hold a decent conversation. I enjoy the company of expats and travelers, the common language English. 

I’ve met so many people who’ve spent most of their lives on the road, backpacking through India and bicycling all over Africa. I thought i was something, having been in 40 countries. And that fellow has been in 90 and that fellow 117. I feel like I’ve wasted a good bit on my life on security and habit. And what now? Yes, if i retire, i will enter the land without time, as long as i don’t seek stability. Deepak Chopra says feeling old depends on two things: the view of people around you and the despair of so little time left.  If I can ignore others and imagine i live in a place where there is no time i will be fine. 

“Falling, falling, falling.” Alice

Having fallen twice in the last several weeks, the first time flat on a cement sidewalk, i don’t even want to think about it. PTSD i suppose. Just before leaving Mexico City, i met an Argentine woman in hostel who had no front teeth. A drunk had slammed her agains a wall. Now she was terrified of everything. She couldn’t even get on the plane to return home when relatives sent her the ticket. Her hands like claws, they seemed to be convulsively clutching  a life-raft.

Now i understood her condition. Yes, a couple of kind Mexican woman handed me Kleenex as the blood dripped from my face, a fellow helped me up, had me sit down and insisted i wait till the medico arrived.  I waited half an hour, then walked dazed several blocks back to the hostel. The landlady bought arnica for me and i smeared it on the goose egg by my left eye. I flopped on my bed and slept for 12 hours.

If i were 20 instead of 80 I probably wouldn’t have taken seriously. They say you feel old when you have a permanent injury. Would i be crippled for life? The face wound retreated, but it took several weeks for the muscles in back and chest to stop aching. Then two days ago, i fell entering an air shaft to dry pants i had just washed. Was i getting senile? I’ve always been in too much in a hurry, trying to correct mistakes after they happened! If only i could go back in time.

So far i seem to be recovering again with a sore shoulder and elbow, a glitch in my hip. Still, i’’m feeling fragile. No wonder our basic fear is of falling. Ah, the poor child learning to walk. And what must Alice have thought, falling into wonderland? Of course, it was a return to childhood. And for me a look at the coming decline of age. I’ve sworn i would never let it happen. No, better to fall on my sword. The trouble is: I’m enjoying life more.

Yes, I’m seriously thinking of settling in Mexico, where i can live on my social security. Covid 19 has made everybody in the United States a little crazy. ‘Normal life’ has crept under the carpet. Sure, the vaccines in process, but will a life with masks retreat from consciousness? However, the real question is: as I enjoy living more can i let go of it as easily as last summer, when i felt like jumping off a cliff every day? Only time will tell. 

The gods must be crazy

Or i must be! I know perfectly well what i have to do to escape a virus: boost my immune system. No TOBACCO. ALCOHOL. SUGAR. Plenty of sleep, exercise, vegetables. Lower my stress in every way possible. Stay out of bakeries. Take VITAMINS A, D, B, and ZINC. Research everything i can about the immune system.  YouTube has a wealth of information. Sure, people contradict each other, but i try to use what little brains i have. What is the unhealthiest country in the world? That’s a no-brainer. 

OBESITY

I know I need to lose weight. Why don’t i do it? I like being the weight i am. If i gain, i feel bad. If i lose too much i look like a scarecrow. Who was it said, “if human beings weren’t vain, they’d have nothing to talk about?” Of course, I’m a disgrace to the species. Wealth has ruined us all. If i were a hunter-gatherer I’d be lean and tough as nails. 

Yes, I’ve drunk too many lattes, resided too long in coffee shops. Read too many books. Grown too old, a prime target for any self-respecting virus. “We can’t let this guy go. What would they say back home?”

And it feels there’s no place to run to. If the USA is bad, Mexico has the highest level of diabetes in Latin America. (Yes, stay out of those wonderful bakeries.) And to be good, you have to live in a country like CANADA, where people being barricaded inside their houses, or AUSTRALIA, where police rounding up people on the streets. In other words, I’d have to be pleased fascism is saving my life, so I CAN sit at home and stare at the wall. 

Unfortunately, I’ve been raised as an individual and will sneak around as best i can to find nooks and crannies of normality. Somebody’s got to do and i believe it is my duty and sanity. 

Always carry a backup phone when traveling!

 I look down at my shirt pocket, AND MY CELL PHONE IS GONE1 A moment of absolute panic. Here i am in the huge airport of Brasilia, Brazil. I can’t believe it. I run down the stairs to the last place i had it, a booth of the airlines. No one in line has seen it. I run back up, trip on the escalator and dump food all over the place. A the information booth the woman speaks little English. She calls for another, who does. I find out Find My Phone won’t work here. She can’t call a number out of country. I moan and beat my head. Then a call comes. A security guard has found a phone. I wait in a state of suspended animation. Yes, it is my phone. He found it hanging from a luggage cart.

How dumb. The chain tangled itself in the cart. It’s usually  around my neck, but I’d been taking pictures. So much for this nightmare. I ate ice cream and drank a cappuccino to calm down. I have a backup phone and didn’t  bring it. Okay, there’s the experienced traveler totally losing his cool. Here in Mexico City I’ll search for an older phone. I know where the iPhone store is. At the same time I’m totally exhausted from the 20 hour flight. I dragged my bags all over on a six hour break. Not only that after the telephone fiasco i tripped on my bags,  raisins all over the carpet. Later i find I’ve  sprained my left wrist more than I thought.

Okay, i did sleep almost sixteen hours before sitting down to write this. There’s something not so good about having my mind befuddled. I’ve paid for two weeks at the Selina Hostel to get me through the holidays, waiting to see if i brought back Covid with me. I doubt i have. No symptoms. And i just checked with my hometown. Nine more people died, so far I’m better off and I’ve had some very unusual experiences. Better than  lying in a bed in familiar surroundings , the grim reaper haunting my dreams. Of course i used to think, “Make good memories and you can die happy.> ah, that illusion has been dispelled forever..

I flew off to Brazil on invitation from a young woman I’d barely met in mexico last winter. I hesitated. My friend Lucas said,” you might as well have an adventure in Brazil in the warm air instead of a sitting here waiting for winter.”  his words took hold. And a wild time it turned out to be, though nothing I anticipated. We cycled through lovers, mates and friends in one week, the fastest complete relationship I could imagine. We left it at friends i hope. What’s odd is we had more in common than two people have a right to be. Born in Brazil, she moved to Germany at 19 . Studied dance and theater in Holland. We knew all the same names and places. At thirty two she gave up dance, to become a therapist astrologer  traveling around Brazil, learnng kite surfing and giving ‘readings. It just proves having a lot in common doesn’t mean being soul mates. 

A cat separated too soon from its mother

 Well, now i am embarrassed. I had an astrology reading from a woman, Kay Taylor, and afterwards i felt very unsatisfied and told her so. Partly this was due to my phone not recording the session. I couldn’t listen to the session again, and that’s when i learn the most. She had recorded it. And when I listened again, it made more sense.

What bothered me was it was so gloomy. Betrayal. Distrust. Fear. In fact she said my chart dominated by the last. She said my recent past life came from a death just before WWII. My birthday May 5, 1940.  I’d always felt I’d been Jewish. She said I’d been betrayed by the community and had troubles with trust.

So be it. I’m prey to pain attacks which I never had when younger. In fact i had a bad one early yesterday morning. It took the whole day to shake it off. And now I’m very conscious of how fearful i can be. I hope i can say with Georgia O’Keefe, “I’ve always been afraid and I’ve never let it stop me from doing anything.” 

This morning it occurred to me i act like the black cat i shared an apartment with briefly after leaving the lookout. The landlady said it had been separated from its mother too early. It kept kneading pillows for example. I just looked up the characteristics of such a cat:

From a mental or developmental standpoint, kittens who have been separated too soon may not be as easily socialized, whether that is with their people or other animals. They don't know what they are. They don't know what normal cat behavior is.

Kittens who have been separated too soon can have physical as well as mental problems. In terms of physical problems, they may not have good coordination or understand how to stalk prey and how to translate this behavior into appropriate play with their human. They may be aloof, wary or fearful of touch.

The more i read, the more sense it makes. My first grade report card:  He doesn’t play well with others. And my mother saying “You played alone so much I never thought you’d have any friends.” My sister born just a year after me. I was dethroned! I became a real pest after that. I did everything i could to upstage my baby sister. Poor girl. She too had a rough start.

The astrologer gave me one piece of good advice: pursue pleasure and happiness. I’ve never been good at that. 

The horrors of travel

 

Yes, yes, i could have stayed home, stared at the wall with everything in town closed and continued to be suicidal. Instead i decided to fly to Mexico City where people wearing masks and NOBODY SOCIAL DISTANCING. So it may be a form of suicide yet! Mexicans do not have the luxury of Americans. They can’t stay home. They have to work. Everything open - except a few of my favorite museums - the streets and subway often crowded. I’m taking chances i would never take at home. If this is goodbye, have a sweet time with the rest of your lives.

I am discovering again why i like to travel. I walk all day, then in the evening I go to bed early and do nothing, like read, watch YouTube videos about people traveling in other places like turkey and Serbia, and daydream a lot. At home i have to always be doing something. Just lying around not my style. Only in Greece years ago could i lay for hours on the beach, soaking up the sun. Travel puts me in a different space, brings out the idle human being. Jung once said, “Don’t underestimate human laziness”. Ah, what a pleasure it can be!

With no paintings to look at, I’m wandering the streets and discovering new places. One is a market area near where I’m staying. I sat in a little square with a semi-circle of smiling and laughing metal heads on pedestals. Memoirs of poets, singers, goofy politicians? I never did figure it out. One fellow in the spiffy dress and big mustache of another century plopped himself down next to me. As i said, social distancing doesn’t exist, except by me. I moved to another bench. 

I have never seen so many chopped up chickens, wings being bagged up, breasts piled, feet discarded. This definitely a foodies paradise. One huge market held traditional foods from all over mexico. Mouth-watering, to say the least. I bought prunes at a specialty store, a hundred spices in jars. Yes, I’m having trouble with my plumbing, the opposite of what you’re supposed to expect in mexico. I am afraid of eating street food, exactly what every guidebook on mexico raves about. This city considered a heaven for gourmands. I need to search out some of the vegetarian restaurants. I know they exist.

Here comes the sun after four grey days. It makes a hellava difference. The city rather grim without the blue sky. Yes, it’s true. I’m just biding my time until leaving for Brazil next week. I’ll be joining a friend for three weeks travel in the northeast of the country. According to the web, that area has few cases of Covid. At least I’ll have someone to get me to a hospital, if i need it. I loaded up on travel health insurance before leaving. Alas, i have to get where i can use it first. Wish me good luck. As my brother said, “If you’re afraid, you will never travel anywhere.”

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How can i escape my age?

 i grew up being told, "You have to watch the news. You must know what's going on." alas, i learned the news bad for my health, physical and mental. the reason: it really has nothing to do with facts and everything to do with SPECULATION. what i'm given on the boob tube is never what is happening but what may happen, and it's always scary as hell. like everyone, i like to drive slowly past a car wreck, looking for blood and bodies. and yet, to have it in my living room every night makes me bolt the door and crawl under the covers.

once i get there, i know what to do. read a novel, about life in another time, took at art works, listen to classical music, in other words, desert the information age for the age of stories, of episodes in history having meaning, perhaps simply by being purified. i need to experience love stories, happy ending or not, epics of bravery, even if the hero killed. i ride on the wings of song like a magician on a magic carpet. underneath the blankets the world becomes bearable. even tragedy lifts me up. i can face the violence and stupidity of our age by visiting that in another and knowing civilization survived.

as for my own age, of course, death is the only solution. sooner or later my decrepritude will subsume me. and in the mean time, all i can do is escape into exercise, fiction, conversations, travel, hoping when the time comes i will still be able to master my own fate. alas, the general population doesn't want to pay taxes for the arts. everybody enjoys them. in this period of being house-bound, what sustains them but music, movies, books, adventures in fictional time?

 

and now i watch the election results with horror. RED means i will not pay for the society i live in, hospitals, schools, symphonies, traffic lights, asphalt to fill the potholes. I WILL NOT BE A PERSON OF MY TIME. what irony! what good has all that news done but make misers of the voters, they grasp their pennies as if they would save them from global warming. avoiding the public good, they put themselves in danger. how do they not know it? maybe human ignorance is bottomless. staring at the screen, i see a vast void behind it. 

at the same time i can go back to old stories, old pictures, and find hope. other ages have been far more disastrous than our own. peter the great leveled whole cities and massacred the population, attilla the hun didn't do much better, and the romans raked carthage into the ground. we survived the middle ages and recent terrible wars. not that we're in the clear. still, it helps to know history. that is news that stays news, as ezra pound said about poetry, the news people die from not knowing. i always speak for the arts. they really need no reason. yet i have to say something to keep from going mad.

How do i re-connect with my own mythology?

interviewing a lot of lookouts about their work, i discovered everyone dominated by a personal mythology, or a way of seeing things. one lookout always had a mirror out, looking at everything from two sides. another had a log fall on his father, right after his father had told him how not to have that happen. once he sat in his tower, and a tree fell close by, loggers at work without his knowledge. i had the feeling he was always waiting for the log to fall (maybe on him). 

the way i discovered this was recording the interviews and then listening to them for clues. certain words, certain images would come up over and over again. there's really nothing mysterious about this. yesterday, i read a lot of ancient greek and roman poets. any creative person reveals themselves, in fact they have to for their work to resonate. all of us somewhere reflect on the agonies of love, the inevitability of age and death. the ancients sound very like me!

and that's the consolation of the arts. they tell stories of what we've all gone through. i myself am a part of human history and not alone. i may be somewhat unique in experiencing LIFE AS THERAPY! this morning i listed all my therapeutic activities: 

                                  1. theater

                                  2. travel

                                   3. art

                                   4. writing

                                   5 . photography

                                   6. love affairs

   the list could go on and include actual therapists (3) and psychics (5), all of whom kept me going, even if they couldn't cure my anxieties. one said i'd been too impressed by death when young. i'm not sure if this came from newsreels of world war two or my preacher father's celebrations of funerals. i do remember running out of the room to escape the women in black and the friend underneath glass in his coffin, this the day after i'd been playing with him.

as for my own mythology, when i first started writing a lot at 17, i imagined myself as a clown falling through the universe. i think that my dominate image, though i also thought, interviewing myself, I WAS ALWAYS HIDING IN THE CENTER. i suppose that's like being invisible even as i exposed myself in photos and poems. this could be the reason i've never pursued a public career. one psychic, after reviewing my past lives, said, "You carried so much responsibility in past lives, including being a scientist who helped blow up Atlantis, you get to play in this lifetime."

yes, i do think this time as cavorting in a playground! unfortunately, even as i've enjoyed process more that product, i wish i had something to show for it, a legacy i could leave. maybe throwing out fifty boxes of notebooks and journals not such a good idea. still, as a friend said some years ago during our new year's day consultation, "nobody will want to deal with it all." i realized she was right. only the publically accomplished have their papers installed in institutions.

i haven't really answered my original question: how do i re-connect with my own mythology? theoretically, any of my old methods should work. i don't know what's stopping me from taking the first step. i suspect it's looking for results, rather than merely enjoying the process. there's always a chance drawing the first line could end up being a rembrandt! does it really matter. acclaim doesn't wake the dead, alas. on the other hand, merely taking a walk with observant eyes always brings something new. 

Where have all my heroes gone?

 actually, they haven't disappeared, i simply forget to consult them. for example, FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA. as i sat in the san francisco poetry room of city lights books, looking at all the tomes on the shelves, pulling out this one and that one, searching for inspiration from poets past and present, only when i pulled down lorca's collected poems did i feel the rush of delight from the past. it is very odd, in a way, since he was obsessed with death from the beginning, and it's always present. early on he treats it in a child-like way, the landscape, the moon, stars, wind, the girl in the apple tree, always surviving the death of the rider passing by. there is a certain permanence in the song.

let's see, another hero might be CG Jung, the analyst and magician of the collective unconscious. one summer on stateline lookout at lake tahoe, i read 44 books by and about him. i'm not sure how he consoled me. mostly his concept of the Anima, the image of the perfect woman in each man, seemed to apply to myself. he describes her as very demanding, never satisfied with any human woman you may choose, also competitive with her and extremely critical. my own moods seem dominated by such an inner witch. not surprising, since my mother harsh with all my girlfriends. she, too, couldn't stand any competition. 

jung's concept of the archetypes explained a lot to me, especially the trends of history, how one would dominate a certain time i lived in. ah, i've forgotten how he did it all! the vision would certainly apply to the time we know and hate. Could it be the archetype of the Lie? what i admired most, i supposed was the life he created, how he kept himself sane, working with his hands and having a brilliant mistress. he knew how to stabilize himself and actually created a psychological mythology and method which could be of use to many people, especially artists. and he could pursue a thought down to the depths of a rabbit hole. also with mandalas, he created a way to use art as a stabilizing force.

what other heroes came and went? i'm trying to think of my early days in sports. i was never very good at any of them, though i played tennis, baseball, football, basketball, and bowling. not being a team player, i could never pass the ball and served out my days on the third string bench. i do remember admiring willy mays and i quote him often: "i go with my strengths and forget about my weaknesses." that still seems to me very good advice. alas, i have spent way too much time being lost in efforts to be rational and calm. even years of therapy never brought that about. 

the only politician on my list JOHN F KENNEDY, a bit tarnished by time, all his messing about with prostitutes secretly brought into the white house by the back door, his suspicious shadow over the death of marilyn monroe, his getting us involved in vietnam. a hero may only remain one by my knowing too little more than too much. they're really actors on the stage, magnified by their simplicity. the character strutting the boards before me not human beings but mythologies. that's what heroes do, they create myths of themselves. and i absorb the energy they give off in the process.

alas, all heroes prove to be human-all-too-human. as real people they die. that's a fact i can never quite get beyond. true, their stories live on, i can participate in them vicariously, and be inspired by certain events, certain works. i have become too cynical, too worldly, and yet when i remember to go back to the source, THE HEROES JOURNEY,  and do what i can to remember my own, i'm revitalized. it's a lesson i have to learn over and over again. 

How do you recover your balance?

i have to admit i feel off-balance 75% of the time. for example, i arrived at the lookout after four days off. it was dark. the wind blew hard. unwisely, i carried my first load up the road and lookout steps, overburdened. i'd driven most of the day, a total of seven hours. no wonder i lurched badly sideways ascending the steps. as usual, i forged ahead without thinking what i was doing. i reached the landing, thank god, then had trouble inserting the key in the lock. once i did, the siren went off. 

the relief lookout had set the alarm. boy, it damn near broke my ear drums. hastily, i rushed to the basement and punched the buttons. thankfully, the sound stopped. by now i was at least alert. this is just one example of rushing through the world and almost losing it. at times i seem to forget how to walk. making it conscious, i have trouble putting one foot in front of another. it's mostly mental. when my confidence returns and my self-consciousness subsides, i move through the world like nothing ever happened.

of course, physical equilibrium is the least of my problems. all summer i've thought about suicide, i'm even reading a book about it SUICIDAL, WHY PEOPLE KILL THEMSELVES  by Jesse  Bering. this isn't really something new. at 17 i remember being afraid to sleep in a room with knives, afraid i'd do myself harm. maybe i'm always trying escape, as the author surmises. escape from what, you may ask? sometimes it seems hard to do anything i need to do, like pick a pencil up from off the floor. there's a resistance to any action. 

so far, i've been able to pick up that pencil. and i wonder why on earth it seems so difficult? other times i clean the dishes, wash the clothes, and proceed without any hesitation. i do think it has something to do with mental balance, that which comes and goes. often if i can perform the right action, i'm standing back on my own two feet. living alone in a room, everything stable around me, i dive off the deep end into a desire for non-existence. and this doesn't seem to happen, when i'm in motion, when i travel.

for example, last week i reached the end of my tether, worrying about the end of the season and leaving the lookout in a couple weeks. i'd planned a trip east and no one, even friends and family, wanted a visitor who might bring covid. my support system dropped right out from under me. okay, i decided to make a test run. i drove to san francisco and stayed in a youth hostel. they put one person into a room and i had four beds to myself. that was great luck. i had a chance to practice traveling in relative safety. 

for the next two days i visited museums: the De Young, SFMOMA, and the Asian Museum. i soaked up the art as i always do, a vision of perfect worlds. artists create places we can go when life becomes too much for us, this time when nothing seems ever finished - fires and viruses - a chaos without true order. security doesn't really exist except as a result of the imagination. 

to finish off the trip i walked up grant street through chinatown. certainly eerie, 90% of the stores and restaurants closed, and browsed in my old haunt of 60 years ago, CITY LIGHTS BOOKS. it brought back a certain peace. it had changed very little. i sat in a rocking chair upstairs in the poetry room and surveyed the shelves. true, i felt my own poetry could never compete with all this, yet i kept looking for a new poet, stumbling across the old ones. finally, only my own standby, FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA, brought me the solace in needed.

yes, i did stumble blindly on the steps, in the dark and high wind, and two days later the euphoria of travel has worn off a bit. this morning i woke up anxious, wondering if i'd caught the virus. i took a tylenol to calm down. still when i think about it, i enjoyed setting myself  up in the hostel room. even the homeless on the corners  with all their oddities give a kind of consolation. and sitting in the cafe at the de Young, bathing in the sunlight and observing the folks eating and chatting without masks, brings back a sense of normality, and enjoyable existence. i hope i've broken the spell, regained my balance, and am ready to travel again. 

Getting started: process or results?

 my biggest problem: i can never take my own advice. i know what to do. then i'm too lazy to actually do it! they say, "a journey of a thousand miles starts with one step." how true! yet that initial move inhibited by my fear of getting on the wrong path, of committing myself to an endeavor i will most certainly find dangerous or pointless, having wasted half a lifetime to reach an unsatisfying goal. (Carl Jung said, "we shouldn't underestimate the power of laziness.) 

how do i overcome my lethargy? i really have a bad memory for what works. i do know i have been inspired by copying, like an artist drawing old statues or famous paintings and making them her own. i have a friend who copies chinese ink paintings, the results beautiful. he doesn't really know what they are. Are they his own or merely false interpretations? ah, but what is important, every evening he retreats to his desk and becomes an ancient sage. 

if he were too concerned with results, he probably wouldn't do anything, yet the process is its own reward. a choreographer told me i liked process more than results, whereas she focused on the latter. of course, that's one reason i've never become famous. i have completed a lot of projects (fifty books of photos, letters, poems, plays, novels, on amazon). once done, i do find them satisfying. i enjoy, especially, reading my own poems. often they make me laugh. what could be better than that? 

unfortunately, i filled a five by ten foot storage space with at least fifty boxes of journals, notebooks, photographs, manuscripts, and asorted creations - and then i turned eighty. my god, what would i do with all this stuff! in the end, i've thrown out practically all of it, saving two boxes and sending them to my niece for family history. sure, i hope to be discovered. still, i feel now i'm a light-weight. not that i regret writing and filming so much. i have the bulk of results on external hard-drives. my choice of discards: what merely reflected process.

by that i mean diaries, sketches for plays, journals, etc., everything i felt reflected 'mere' preparation. this might have been of interest to a scholar, but every dying artist who hasn't made a name for himself needs an advocate, someone to preserve and promote the heritage. i have one friend doing this for her deceased artist-husband. it's taken her several years of concentrated work to catalogue the mountain of creations: drawings, watercolors, journals, writings. she's created a website. now comes finding an institution to house the rest.

recently, at a session devoted to how to keep your work alive once you are dead, an artist said, "recently four artists in town have died - and all their work is gone.'  this, of course, is a good reason to devote myself to creation for its own sake. gardening is the most popular hobby in the country and the best physical exercise! for good reason: you can eat the results. alas, avid gardeners usually produce too much, eager to give it away, if they can find takers. 

yes, ultimately, for most part, i have enjoyed the process. getting up at five in the morning for days on end, or struck by a certain call from the personal genie anytime whaling away on a collection of poems with a theme (i hardly ever wrote a solitary poem). the  book FLOW by  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi    tells the secret. once i get going, there's no stopping me: not worries about fame or results, nothing related to my image in the world. i expected to be a famous playwright someday and didn't have the right personality. to hell with it!

when i get depressed, i know i'm too inhibited and lazy to take the first step. just doing something will usually change my mood. these days, having thrown out so much, it's difficult to make a move. if i could just draw one line, it would lead to a work of art. if i could put down a few words, it would lead to a poem. i know the right answer to the question: how do i get started? its really easy if i take delight in the dictionary, as i did in the old days. i need to put on a french chanson and soon i'm sent spinning off from france in the fifties into my own heaven.

for Linda

How do you become a master of change?

The end of fire season staring me in the face, how do I avoid panic? I look through quotations on change. None of them seem to help.

Life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it. Boris Pasternak

Everything flows. Nothing stays the same. Heraclitus 

As true as these things are, i still find it hard to roll with the punches, even with changing habitats at least two hundred times in my life.

My family moved 32 times by the time I had left high school. This included California (many times), Montana, Washington, Indiana, Utah, Wyoming, and finally Germany. So, i should be used to it. alas, moving with my family not the same as being on my own. now, the lookout job accounts for 114 moves, back and forth every year. and my determination never to buy a house has kept me searching every winter.

my passion for theater took me to new york city several times. with the help of friends i found places to stay and classes to take. memories of europe pulled me off the lookout for two years. i lived in greece, germany, and england, pursuing art and literature. (and girlfriends - yes, they led me a merry chase). for some reason i never questioned my ability to cope.

i started using chico, california as my base in 1981, making good friends and taking university classes, plus taking millions of photographs: dance, theater, the community. at certain times i did travel: bali, india, adventures with my friend berta: five months in europe, time in central america, sri lanka, thailand. her death really deprived me of a good friend and a great travel companion. i did make a trip to japan with my friend marilyn and one last gasp in europe: amsterdam and paris.

911 put away any desires i had to travel for 16 years. finally, several years ago, the urge, even necessity for change, took me twice to australia and twice to mexico. it took me awhile to get into the rhythm of it. my first days in australia i felt afraid and depressed, not finding solace in youth hostels and museums. eventually i did get going and after a month i felt more confident and full of vivid and creative culture. i spoke the language and had some great conversations.

there's  the key: people.  my mother said once i played so much alone she never thought i'd have any friends, plesantly surprised when i did. despite so many years on the lookout, i've rarely felt lonely, only in the first days when i felt horny, and then i couldn't wait for the season to end. unfortunately, the covid scare has changed things. i can't have visitors in the lookout. for 20 years i spent my days off house-sitting in chico while a friend spent the summer at her house in france. these days she doesn't want to get on an airplane.

many countries won't allow americans into them. i can go back to mexico city, and am looking forward to it once the museums open. i have missed friends a lot, and i think that accounts for the depression coming and going all summer. alas, i need people and conversations. though i'm frequently seen as a loner, especially by fellow forest service employees. now i want to take a swing east, visiting friends and family in nashville, atlanta, south carolina, maryland, washington, dc, new york, and finally for some warm weather, florida. please wish me well!