You Can Leave Your Hat On

I'm not a computer person, I know how to type and that's it. I just took a disc to the library with me today and it wouldn't work, it was like totally blank. It had worked just fine yesterday. I'm back in my hotel room now at my old machine and that disc cuts me back to the desktop when I try to open it.. And I just found out yesterday that my old Walkman ear plugs work for sound on computers, after all this time of surfing in silence. I had given it a shot to hear a video on that e-mail I mentioned last post, about the spiritual thing at noon today. (Saturday.) So since I couldn't do what I'd planned with what was on that disc, I watched YouTube for the first time, and enjoyed some music from a few MySpace friends. After all this time. (Duh.)

So anyway, I didn't observe the spiritual trip at noon. Even after all the psychedelics I've done, I like to deal with the real world. I've seen how little it takes to get by and be really happy, myself and others, and I think that's the secret. Until the Internet, I wasn't having any luck getting my 2-cents in on the raging debate. I wrote a story back in 1985-6 called "The Last Resort", about a middle-class couple in their early thirties whose car breaks down in central Washington State as they're taking the scenic route to California. They end up staying at out-of-the-way Twin Peaks, a row of small wooden cabins and a campground, inhabited mostly by various folks in the area for the apple-picking season. The couple is forced to see a different outlook on life, but I soon realized that it was too much of a pre-AIDS story; too much casual sex. So I shelved it and for the next four years worked on a new story in my head as I did various jobs and hitchhiked around. In 1992, I gave up hitchhiking, started tying my hair back every day, and bought a one-way bus ticket to Nashville to get away from all things familiar and write a near-future adventure novel. This story was about a 30-year-old dentist from Southern California who takes off into the wilds of Northern California looking for the granddaughter of a friend. Living without a firm schedule was very hard for the guy, he kept trying to plan ahead the whole trip. He loses his phone for a while, and that isolation/freedom was a first in his life. The whole book, Sinner's Revenge, (147,000 words) was about how dude discovered the difference between success and happiness. Now I'm doing Grasshopper Planet, comparing the hard-working Ant, and the partyin' Grasshopper, and how I think the planet would be better off with less "economy" and more "satisfaction". If I hadn't been a fugitive, I'd probably have just dug in as best I could like so many people--twenty-nine years on the assembly line--but now I've seen there's more to life than just being secure as possible and gathering all you can until you die. (They'll never tell you that on TV.) Like the couple whose car broke down at apple-picking time, and the dentist who was off doing a favor for a friend, I reluctantly realized a more genial outlook towards this here life.

Right when the movie The Hustler came out, when I was heavily into shooting pool and in high school, the only place to shoot in Flemington, New Jersey, was on the three ancient full-size tables in the back room of the barroom of the Union Hotel on Main Street. It was so full of players most of the time that I'd wanted to shoot so bad some days I'd go to a nine-ball game in progress and offer, if they'd let me in the game, to pay anybody who made a money ball, but if I made one, they didn't have to pay me for it; I just wanted to shoot pool. One day when it was really packed, people standing around waiting for a chance to get a table, I went through the alcove to the bar to get a soda. Two old guys were sitting at the bar, and one asked the other casually, "Want to shoot some pool?" Like they could just waltz back there and rack 'em up. The other guy thought a second and then said no. Totally no concept of the reality of the situation. Watching the Sunday Morning talk shows today, listening to the pundits discussing the world situation from only various corporate angles, it reminded me of those two old guys deciding whether to go shoot a game of pool. Talk about arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Sitting on a dying planet, surrounded by fires, floods, and fading life-sustaining resources, they talk away about which presidential candidate can lower gas prices and get us consuming more and the economy rolling again like it was 1928 or something. If those two guys at the bar had decided to go back to the pool room they would have learned something about the actual situation, but the business execs, their politicians, and the people paid good money to take them seriously, are so insulated from the real world, I'm afraid "endangered planet" and "poor people" are as curious and foreign hypothetical theories to them as the concept of "having enough".

And, sigh, the Hippie-Dippy Weatherman died last night. "There's a low over the East Coast. A low over the South. A low over the North-West. What this country really needs is a good high!" I loved his Seven Words You Can't Say On Television. " . . . and tits, tits doesn't even belong on the list!" He was getting pretty mean-spirited towards the end; I think the lack of progress after all the years of work by him and others to point things out to the rest of the world finally got to him. "And there are two-way words. You can prick your finger, but don't finger your prick. No-no."

RIP George.