Of the Barking Strings: One Account of Growing Up in the 80s, Part I: Start with Nancy Sinatra Reclining on Stage in her Pink, Pseudo-Native American Dress and Pink Boots

The other day a friend asked me how I would start film about the old gang.  It was a reciprocal question; I'd asked all of them the same thing.  They gave me history--how it all started at Bill's Ice Cream in a large and sprawling city on a great, humid plain.  Now, what am I suppose to do with that?

I do feel the stickiness of dried ice cream up to my elbow from reaching way down into the square carton, making sure I "square dipped" appropriately so that we wouldn't have shrinkage.

I remember working the line on those hot August nights when it snaked around the metal bars and people stood with the glass front doors open waiting outside to get out of the heat and have some cool ice cream.  I remember picturing them as flies and wishing I had a great can of bug spray to knock them down, so we could sweep their buzzing, bumbling bodies out the door with a push broom and and shut down.  But the fools just continued to come in.

But what am I to do with that?

I remember Jim belching out the Boss while stocking the milk room--how it was low and muffled until Andrea opened the glass door to Windex it, and it then blasted through the store--

I ain't nothing but tired
Man I'm just tired and bored with myself
Hey there baby, I could use just a little help

Or I remember some chubby, blond punk-ass kid, saying "squeeze-me" for "excuse me" each time he passed a girl behind ice cream counter on his way to get a broom or rag from the back.

But what am I to do with that?

I remember one time Phil asked Andrea if she could invite anyone over for Thanksgiving, who would it be? and she replied, "Sid Vicious."

Okay, maybe I could use that.

But I think I'd start instead with Nancy Sinatra reclining on stage in her pink, pseudo-Native American dress and pink boots singing, "Bang, Bang--My Baby Shot Me Dead."  It's stark--that black background against that shocking pink; it's glamorous--oh that thick, deep 60s long, blond hair; and it has nothing what-so-ever to do with the story-line, which would have been my take on things at the time.

Then, perhaps, there'd be a shot of the gang at the zoo feeding flamingos.  Marsh, here after known as Swamp, would be looking into the camera with strait, dark brown shoulder length hair, Lennon-specs and a cheesy smile.  He'd be wearing a white U2 Joshua Tree t-shirt.  Andrea would be bending over the metal bar, wearing a bright blue t-shirt and blue and black checkered Capris talking to a flamingo directly below her. Here, her hair would be auburn and straight, but it could be any color from neon orange to purple.  Each scene it will be different.  The movie will end with Andrea as Nancy Sinatra, only she will be dressed like Sinead O'Connor and will have a shaved head.  She won't like that.  She won't like any of it.  Jim, I'm not sure what Jim does.  He wears a concert shirt of the Police.  It has the arms ripped off.  He's showing off his muscle.  Oh, I got it, he stands next to Andrea, but faces towards the camera while she faces away.  He looks down at the concrete wearing dark sun-glasses, the type Buddy Holly would wear if Buddy Holly wore sunglasses.  He's counting ants on the ground.  He's up to twenty-four.  I'm not sure why.

The Barking Strings are never sure why.

Phil is pelting the flamingos with bread.  Or, rather Phil, here after known as Glasses, is trying to pelt the flamingos with bread.  Bread doesn't make very good stones.  He looks like Neil Young.  He will hate that.

He doesn't hate Neil Young.  That will soon become very apparent.  But, he will hate that he looks like Neil Young.

Lucy, she now prefers to be called Lucia, will be telling Phil, I mean Glasses, to stop it, that he's mean.  She is the 1960s counter-culture type--two braided pony tails, leather headband, tie-died t-shirt, flowing skirt and all.

Me.  Well, I'm skinny with a white dress shirt that is big and sloppy.  I wear blue-gray dress slacks and canvas vans.  I have a bit of mullet, and if I looked cool, I'd look a bit like Cy Curnin of the Fixx (see video below), but I'm not cool.  I'm a geek with a great unused mind instead.

I hold up a copy of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, open the cover, and show the author's note to the audience.  The camera zooms in on the following:

I am not I; thou art not he or she;

they are not they.

--E.W.

There is a black and white shot of U2 by the Mississippi River.  "Heartland" plays.  Scene fades. 

    

Lean Into the Past with Found Objects: Remants of Time Add Weight and Depth to a Garden

Cities are moving people

Who just forgot their lives.

--Cy Curnin of The Fixx

Old farm houses like this one, which I pass daily on my way to work, inform my garden.

June.  Summer time.  A smack-a-fly-dead day.  This valley is me.  This place I know deeply.  I sit in my recliner and stare out the window.  Heavy sunlight glistens off the oaks my brother and I planted 14 years ago.  I have known them since they were six inches tall.  Rye gently sways before them.  My eyes are weighted.  There is depth here.  I lean into this place and it accepts me.  We are not separate.  There was a time when many people had such a connection.  So much of humanity has vacated place.  I don't understand it.  I accept it.  I know what it is like.  I have lived in apartments and have moved when rent increased.  I know that world.  I have sat still on the expressway under an intense sun staring at a glass box office building waiting for the traffic to move.  But it has never been me.  Here is where I have always been--this great western valley with less than two people per square mile.

One of the Oaks Lloyd and I planted 17 years ago viewed through a wine glass that sits in the window.

I think it is important something of our past remains.  Perhaps, we can't all be farmers.  Perhaps we can't all sit on ninety acres and listen to cicadas sing while looking at the world through the stem of a wine glass. Perhaps for most of us, home will be temporary, but we can garden whatever lot or balcony we have intensely, personally, hands stained black by soil.  And we can bring in remnants of time, symbols of a past that wasn't plastic--a rusted wheelbarrow, an old iron bolt, a weathered shingle, a broken cinder block--ghostly messages from a world that wasn't digital.

To me, it seems vital.

An old hay rake that was on the property when my parents purchased it.

A vignette that I set up in the old pig shed.

A recycled mushroom bed from a local mushroom farm that I set on it's side to form a wall.

I built this hanging bucket garden to tie in with the pig shed, the last standing farm building.

Below are some a couple of YouTube videos with great ideas for bringing the past into your garden.

And finally here are a couple of great videos by the Fixx on the collapse of farming communities and man's isolation from the soil.  

Life (Buddhism, Mormonism, poetry, the Creative Process & the Fixx)

I first came to poetry through music.  When I was a teenager, I would listen to groups like the Cure, the Police, the Fixx, and the music would drive words--not just their words, but my words and their words mingled together, and I would write poems that, although mostly mine, would never have arrived without theirs--a sort of strange dialogue, where both are talking, but only I am listening.   Here, I have gone back to my poetic roots, what I consider a righteous plagiarism--the spirit of one artist sustaining another.  Perhaps, it is more for the young, but I enjoyed the Fixx moving me once again. After all, I am definitely old enough to qualify for a mid-life crisis, if not a little beyond that right.

Photo by Rio Brown

Life

Rose red sunsets
and maggots on the bone.
Golden fawn
in the dawn dew meadow
or dead on the road.

Flower blooming,
baby breaking
forth blood-slick
and God-glorious,
parents joy,
gentle rain,
terrible typhoon,
get your ass to your room!

Bitter bite of frost,
the limb-snap
thundering down,
happenstance
blossoming
the end
of one stopping
by woods to
enjoy

silence, ah silence, that moment of stillness....

before the storm,

kneeling,
pleading,
begging,
no, no, no more!

Sun pours
through verdant green canopy
Everything taken
is restored.

Writing Cherry Creek Peak: A Hiking Narrative, Part I (Zen, Writing, Teaching, Hiking, Dooms-Day, America)

View from Cherry Creek Peak.  Photo by Rio Brown

1.        A Long-Winded Discussion—Blah, Blah, Blah—on Zen and the Art of Writing

Because everything connects to everything, it’s difficult to know where to begin a narrative.  This one was to start in an onion field one searing September afternoon.  Then it was to begin one saturated night after a week of dense rain.  Now it will begin in my kitchen as five teenagers sit around the table, view Edward Hopper’s Night Hawks on my computer screen, and frantically write noir narratives. 

The only difference: time.  By the time I got around to writing this hiking narrative, I was no longer in the same place mentally.  And that’s okay—it won’t be the same narrative, but it will still be fresh, vivid and real because I’m beginning where I’m at—now.   That, for me, is why outlines, except for certain tasks, don’t work.  They predetermine the outcome and the richness.  The excitement and power of discovering what you have to say happens outside the text.  The energy occurs while you’re planning, not writing, so the reader never gets to participate in the struggle,  the scuffle,  the dance—the work and play it takes to arrive at that one great moment of thought that makes the whole journey worthwhile. 

No one really wants to be told what to think anyway.  But they may not mind being invited into your brain—an act of voyeurism really—as you struggle for some semblance of coherence.  That is the magic of the Kerouac, of the Beats.  It’s not that they wrote better than previous generations; it’s that they were the first, besides William Carlos Williams, to fully invite us to come along. 

Here, as an experiment, I want to follow my three versions of this narrative just a ways.  Not fully, that would take too long, but far enough to see the path bend around an aspen grove and disappear into the mysterious light and shadow.  Then, to stand there, stop a minute, and imagine the final destination.

Version A:

No shade, that’s for sure.  Little slivers of onions poke through chalk-white alkali in rows that stretch across a monopoly board field.  Tumbleweed piled against barbed wire fence attest that the air did once move.  But the solid wall of stand-still air fortified beneath the blazing sun makes breeze seem as remote as rivers on Mars.  Sure the evidence is there.   Things were different in the past, but when weather is as vacant as the conscience of a corporate CEO, who cares what might have been witnessed in some great past?   The air is a standing wall and you’re under it gagging.

So I sit on my butt under a machine-gun sun and cut weeds away from onions with an exacto-blade while Rod explains the art of tagging, of bombing, of making ones mark. I don’t tell him that no matter how beautiful his outlaw murals are, if they’re painted without permission, they’re not more than a dog’s urine claiming territory.  I hold back because Rod is new, and the new ones are always a little unpredictable, even dangerous.  You don’t get sent to a boy’s home for thinking things through. You get there by doing really stupid stuff.

I think if I followed this version, the focus would be on heat and cool, dry and moist, stagnant and dynamic, lost and found.  I would no doubt reflect on my day job of working with youth who are struggling to find more viable versions of themselves, and how we all are, in a sense, doing the same.

Version B:

Oregon Coast.  That’s how it smells, how it feels—the night air soggy and moldy with life, toads rioting joy after a long, dry summer, little green blades jerking up through the mud under a muted moon, everything slightly misty as the steamy air settles down to dew overnight.  Cool, rich, clean—everything.

Only the dry yellow stubs of wild rye and cheat grass bony blue under the moonlight let me know this is not Oregon—well that and the scrub oak and juniper, oh and rabbit brush and snake weed.  But the rain is enough to make one dream of thick green farm fields, cheese and forest—forest and more forest.

I think in this version I would simply focus on the fecundity of life, the richness of being.  I think I would have very little philosophy to share and would just stick to what is there before me, write the moment to the best of my ability, invite the reader to experience a certain place on a certain day.   

 Version C:

This is how it always is.  You can always feel the energy.  There is nothing like it.  It works every time.  Fourth graders, teenagers, adults—it doesn’t matter.  When people are tricked into entering that moment of being there and listening to that other voice, that inner guide, direct them through a narrative that is magically opening before their eyes, writing for the moment becomes a drug, especially for those who disliked it previously. And even though I make it clear beforehand that they are to stop when I say stop, the hands keep going and some begging starts—can we finish the paragraph, can I do this again, I think I have a better way now, it just occurred to me…

Perhaps I should let it go on.  I know, for a while anyway, they will have a hard time recreating the situation for themselves, even though all it takes is a) giving the mind something unexpected to think about (so it doesn’t follow the same old pathways), b) setting up a sense of urgency (so there’s no time for self-censorship) and c) allowing crud to happen (so there’s no worry about what others will think).

In this case, I’ve projected Edward Hoppers Night Hawks onto the computer screen and given the following rules:  1) Keep your hand moving, 2) no erasing, 3) don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, etc., and 4) remember, you’re allowed to write the worst crap in America.  Because these are teenagers, who moments ago were chasing each other around the kitchen, laughing wildly and spewing soda all over the floor, I’ve added a fifth rule, no talking.  That’s it.  That’s all it takes to turn non-writers into writers.  But, except for Natalie Goldberg (who I’ve adapted my rules from), no one seems to know this. 

That is why I know this hiking narrative that I’ve assigned myself will go somewhere.  It has too.  It doesn’t matter which of the three ways I enter.  If I start in a solid moment, describe it well, and say to myself, now I’m going to stumble through the woods until I find point B, which in this case is the other side of Cherry Creek Peak in northern Utah, I will get there.  And I don’t have to worry if it is the best way to get there because there is no best.  No two journeys are alike.  There is only picking up your crap, putting it on your back and hitting the trail.  Some routs might be longer, might be steeper, might about kill you, might get you lost, wandering aimlessly for hours, wondering if you can ever get out of the tangle of thoughts you’ve created for yourself—which is exactly what’s happening here—but if you follow through, the outcome, especially the journey, is always worthwhile.  And since I’m not actually following the other two pathways, I’ll never know if I chose the right one.  And I don’t need to.  This journey will sustain me well enough to be the one.

Although I don’t necessarily endorse this approach to life, for writing, it is the way:  Just grab your crap and go.  

2.        The Types of Thoughts You Can Have While Ambling Through the Woods

The trail begins at the end of a rutted road in damp leafs scattered before a dry creek bed, which I guess, is usually running.  Jeff and Glen talk of heat, weeks of ninety-plus, even here in the Cache Valley, which is normally mild, even in July or August.  Or use to be.  Heat has become the new language of the west, drought and fire it’s most common literary forms.  Things just aren’t the same.  Everyone knows it, yet it is here that global warming is denied most—a propaganda scheme by liberals to undermine God-given liberties.  I don’t get it; it’s like living with cancer eating you and denying the decay.

It makes me sad to live among such grand people, knowing their lifestyles are being eroded by a diseased climate while they deny it.  Not these two, necessarily, although I don’t ask.  Out here, I’m a lone deer among wolves as far as politics go.  I keep my deer-self hidden and howl now and then like a wolf.  Besides, I have a gas-guzzling super van—Crystal Blue Persuasion—so who am I to preach?  It’s like a cannibal preaching vegetarianism.  My excuse is that change, realistically speaking, must be legislated.  My one-in-billions carbon footprint won’t prevent global warming.  Again, another dangerous thought here, as this is the land of libertarianism.  And here, in the open spaces of the west, that feels right: just let everyone do their own thing.  That works well for a few thousand, not so well for billions.

Anyway, today is moist and cool.  Why think about dead, dying, sick forests going up in hurricane flames if you don’t have to?  Stick to the trail, the here and now, the dense oak, maple and box elder forests crammed in a short, narrow canyon with Hindu Kush slopes on three sides.  Okay, I exaggerate some, but even from here, I can tell we will soon be headed up, and up, and up!

Photo by Rio Brown

But for now, I can amble up the spongy, black dirt trail and divide my time up between reading who- loves-who carved into aspen trunks, enjoying the little blue wild flowers and bright green mosses, or I can think about the book that will end my welcome here in the greatest state in the nation—Christ was a Democrat.  It won’t get me any gold stars with my Arizona in-laws either.  But, analyzing the text, it’s true.  And since no one else seems to be pointing out the obvious—Christ wasn’t a racist, didn’t despise the poor, and wasn’t always looking out for the interests of those already in power—perhaps I should point that out, and while I’m at it, remind my fellow Mormons that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, based on their practices, probably wouldn’t have been big supporters of Rush Limbaugh.

Oh no—I’ve done it now, wiggled my way out of my wolf-suit and shown I’m really a deer.  No, believe me—that’s not true.   Watch me howl!    Ky-yi-yippi-yi, you long-haired Obama supporters ’er gonna die!

Now why would I want to write a book that would rip out my welcome mat to paradise?  Better just focus here on this trail.   Does it really matter if my nearest neighbors glisten when they listen to Rush, when they’d do just about anything to help me, or anyone else they came in contact with, for that matter?  But would they, if they knew I was a Democrat?  That, I guess is the heart of things.  Identity will find a way.  The seed will break open, the sprout will climb up, poke his tender head up through the soil.  For a season, while young, he may even look like all the other young sprouts carpeting the forest floor, but sooner or later, each will announce individual intent—whether he be grass, penstemon, columbine or thistle.   The flute will flower gently.  The guitar will grind grandly.  I’m sick of being who I’m not.  I’m sick of conservatives claiming Christ as their own, chaining morality, beating it into submissiveness like a dog.  To be moral you must be fat, have a receding hairline, a shiny forehead, shop at Wal-Mart and support the NRA.  No dreadlocks, no RASTA, no tofu, no Opera, no egg plant, no wilderness, no bike trail, no hip-hop, no rap, no soul.  But I’m equally tired of liberals writing off religion as ignorance, revelation as insanity and believing in their heart of hearts that every conservative is a Nazi deep down in his soul.

Everywhere I turn, the fabric of America is coming apart.  I want to soar like an eagle, but the higher I go, the better I see the rift spreading, the chasm opening, the void flowering like a galaxy spiraling out between us, a big bang of Nada zipping us away from each other as we become distant dots screaming hateful political propaganda across the eons, which due to the distance, fizzles out in the frozen night. 

A song comes to mind:  There’s always something cooking; nothing in the pot. A song comes to mind:  These are dangerous times.  To think is to dig your own grave.  Better walk gently through the forest, keep down low in the undergrowth, stay in the shadows, be ye deer or wolf. 

Whatever you do, don’t head for the peak, don’t lift your hands to God, don’t yodel from the gut, don’t stand on the pinnacle and scream I AM!  Riffles are loaded.  Triggers are cocked.  No matter who you are—they will shoot you down. 

3.        Rest

Okay.  Wo horsey.  Good golly miss molly.  Where did that come from?  No wonder I need a rest.  Better not put that in the narrative.  Flags, flags, flags for the NSA.  “Rio, get out the trail mix.”

I sit down on a boulder.  The others have been waiting here, maybe fifteen minutes, maybe hours.  I’m lagging, that’s for sure.  But who wouldn’t be?  After that.  Does everyone’s mind spiral out of control that way?  I look around.  Thinning trees, mostly just pines now, some aspen.  Alpine flowers.  It’s clear every way but back is up.  I love the sweet of the M & M’s against the salt of the peanuts.  I love the coolness of the water.  I love that a mind, lost on a runaway train, can sit down and rest, once it’s distracted.  How many family arguments would flutter away if even just one person in the house could just stare at a crumb on the floor or talk to angels long enough for the mind to forget it was right and had to prove it.

That is why, despite the fact it always nearly kills me, I love hiking.  You’re there talking with your own mind for so long, it eventually wears out, and finally, you’re just there in the landscape.

Resting.

A resting point before the long ascent.  Photo by Rio Brown

(The Journey will be continued)

 

 "Outside" by the Fixx, Live 1983