Warning: Poachers

Note the shiny abalone iron.  Abalone season was called off this year and hadn't been in action for some time.  That shiny tool means someone was out there fairly recently; the salt sea is unforgiving in terms of deterioration via rust rust rust.  That clean tool means someone was out doing something they ought not to be doing; we need the abalone protected and unharvested now to recovery from the devastation wrought by the sea urchins on the kelp and other fodder that the abalone rely upon.  A Fish and Wildlife employee pointed out to me that most of the abalone being seen recently are the deeper-water abalone coming up into the more shallow water seeking food.

Being in the shallow water makes them more vulnerable to poachers.

I wanted to bring that abalone iron back to shore, but I also didn't want to be misidentified as a poacher for having such a tool in my possession when the season is closed.  So I left the tool there.  I wish I'd swam the iron into deeper water and tucked it into some difficult crevice.

Linda Gregg's "All The Different Kinds Of Years"

ARRIVING AGAIN AND AGAIN WITHOUT NOTICING

I remember all the different kinds of years,

angry, or brokenhearted, or afraid.

I remember feeling like that 

walking up the mountain along the dirt path

to my broken house on the island.

And long years of waiting in Massachusetts.

The winter walking and hot summer walking.

I finally fell in love with all of it:

dirt, night, rock and far views.

It's strange that my heart is full

now as my desire was then.

--Linda Gregg

(My pal Meredith sent me this poem years ago for my 45th birthday.)

Zevon: "All The Salty Margaritas In Los Angeles"

DESPERADOES UNDER THE EAVES

I was sitting in the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel
I was staring in my empty coffee cup
I was thinking that the gypsy wasn't lyin'
All the salty margaritas in Los Angeles
I'm gonna drink 'em up

And if California slides into the ocean
Like the mystics and statistics say it will
I predict this motel will be standing until I pay my bill

Don't the sun look angry through the trees
Don't the trees look like crucified thieves
Don't you feel like desperadoes under the eaves
Heaven help the one who leaves

Still waking up in the mornings with shaking hands
And I'm trying to find a girl who understands me
But except in dreams you're never really free
Don't the sun look angry at me

I was sitting in the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel
I was listening to the air conditioner hum
It went mmm... mmm...mmmm...mmmm
Look away
(Look away down Gower Avenue, look away)

--Warren Zevon

The lyrics to that favorite song from that early album.

John Buchan: "A Barndoor Fowl"?

Here are two paragraphs from the very end of the first chapter --"Lost Gods"-- of John Buchan's The Island of Sheep, published in 1936, that I'm finding resonant.  Richard Hannay, of The Thirty-Nine Steps, is our narrator, and he's reached his fifties . . . .


I continued my journey -- I was going down t the Solent to see about laying up my boat, for I had lately taken to a mild sort of yachting -- in an odd frame of mind.  I experienced what was rare with me -- a considerable dissatisfaction with life.  Lombard had been absorbed into the great, solid, complacent middle class which he had once despised, and was apparently happy with it.  The man whom I had thought of as a young eagle was content to be a barndoor fowl.  Well, if he was satisfied, it was no business of mine, but I had a dreary sense of the fragility of hopes and dreams.

It was about myself that I felt most dismally.  Lombard's youth had gone, but so had my own.  Lombard was settled like Moab on his lees, but so was I.  We all make pictures of ourselves that we try to live up to, and mine had always been of somebody hard and taut who could preserve to the last day of life a decent vigour of spirit.  Well, I had kept my body in fair training by exercise, but I realized that my soul was in danger of fatty degeneration.  I was too comfortable.  I had all the blessings a man can have, but I wasn't earning them.  I tried to tell myself that I deserved a little peace and quiet, but I got no good from that reflection, for it meant that I had accepted old age.  What were my hobbies and my easy days but the consolations of senility?  I looked at my face in the mirror in the carriage back, and it disgusted me, for it reminded me of my recent companions who had pattered about golf.  Then I became angry with myself.  'You are a fool,' I said.  'You are becoming soft and elderly, which is the law of life, and you haven't the grit to grow old cheerfully.'  That put a stopper on my complaints, but it left me dejected and only half convinced.

--John Buchan, The Island of Sheep

Rafting In The Studio

“Art has always been the raft onto which we climb to save our sanity. I don't see a different purpose for it now.” 

--Dorothea Tanning

I was tempted to title this entry "Anger Management," which is true to an extent, but art's aid to essential sanity is something that I favor and recommend.  I took my own advice and managed to fit the studio into my day.

Three bowls and some silly little figures: feeling fairly sane right now.

Scylla and Charybdis

Anger and Stupidity, in other words.

Monstrosities that will eat you alive, or swallow you down, or both.

Or, perhaps, as in my own case a little too often for my liking, you become the monster, or the maelstrom---or even both--yourself.

And that's no way to live.


(Birthday reflections: improvements and amends to be made.)

Blue Drop

"Why can't you ever let anything just go?" Cora cried.  "Just let it go."

"You think I like remembering everything?" said Tom.  "There's this deep well--dark, dark blue with no edges that I can see--and I just keep dropping deeper and deeper."

"What are you talking about now?  Can't you just finish an argument, for once?"

"Finish it?  There's never an end, don't you get that?  That's what hollow, what empty, means.  It still hurts.  You blink, and I can roll out this anger at what happened before, at what you did or didn't do, at what I did and didn't do, like it happened yesterday.  And it's been years.  You know all that.  Of course, I still get mad.  Getting mad hurts less than being sad.  Sad's like this grip that squeezes and squeezes and never lets up.  The only way to breathe is to roar."

"Roar, roar, roar!  The past--let it go!  You need some help."

"Why do you think I'm still talking?  What do you think I'm doing here?  Throw me a goddamn rope."

"No!  No, you . . . coward!  Swim for it.  Swim out of your goddamn imaginary blue hole yourself!  Or drown.  Drown, drown, drown, drown."

Draft in motion, from "The Devil's Acre."