dead writers - fuckin' dead writers

Damnit. Another one.

James Crumley authored one of my all time favorite books. The Last Good Kiss. He died September 20. Shit. And how fuckin' weird is it that I used The Last Good Kiss book cover for my Sept. 13th entry called "fuckin' writers." Was I channeling him or what?

David McCrumber from the Seattle PI wrote this:

Most of all, I'll remember the many kindnesses he showed me and many others who fashioned themselves writers. I'll savor the conversations and the laughs, the great toasty evenings -- in his Missoula home with the wonderful Martha Elizabeth, Jim's wife, with a cat on every lap and Merle and Lucinda and Lefty on the stereo; at Chico Hot Springs, where Jim would go annually for a fall getaway; and at the Guest House bar in Livingston, which is handy between the first two.

I included this quote because of one phrase..."Merle and Lucinda and Lefty on the stereo." Surely the Lucinda referred to here is Lucinda Williams, one of my road sisters albeit a sister only in spirit and cd and, sadly, not physically.

Man, another person added to my Dead Writer's Society which includes (but is not limited to) Nuala O'Faolain, Larry Brown, Hunter S. Thompson, Spalding Gray, on and on.

Damnit.

domingo en mexico

Even though The Landlord lives just a few yards away, we often call each other on our cell phones so as not to infringe on each other's personal space. "I'm bored," he said. "Let's go to Mexico for lunch." It turned out that The Yoga Teacher was bored, too, so he went with us. We left both their dogs in The Landlord's house which I didn't think was a good idea beings as they don't get along. But what did I know?

Fifteen minutes later we were driving through the streets of the little border town. We stopped at the cemetery and explored the grave sites and grave markers. Most every site was elaborately done up with indoor/outdoor carpet, plastic or silk flowers, wreaths, statues of saints and angels. Most had fences of wrought iron and many had canopies and benches. Very few had marble headstones; most had plain wooden signs with the dead person's name and age. Many had written on them "hijos, nietos y biznietos" which I had to look up in the dictionary when I got home: children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

We went to a seafood restaurant which was so reminiscent of the restaurants in the little town on the Sea of Cortez that I started crying. I love being in Mexico. I miss that fishing village. I miss the people...the Mexican people; not the gringo RVers. I love struggling with the language and dancing to the music.

Anyway, by Mexican standards, this restaurant was not cheap and it was obvious that the families dining there were doing so for special occasions. Everyone was dressed up, probably in their after-church outfits, the little girls in frilly dresses and the boys in crisp white shirts.

Coming back across the border, only The Landlord had his passport with him. What a pain in the ass it is to have to carry a damn passport. The Yoga Teacher and I handed the customs lady our driver's licenses and she said that was okay but we really should have had our birth certificates with us if we didn't have our passports. Then she said, "But really, we're not going to not let you back into your own country just because you don't have a passport or a birth certificate." Huh?

When we got back to The Landlord's only one dog greeted us: His. The Yoga Teacher's dog had escaped by breaking out the bedroom screen. Thankfully she knows her way home so the guys weren't too worried.

Sometimes I think that it's time to live in another part of the desert, up toward Monument Valley or over toward Wickenburg. But I know that if or when I do move, I'll miss being able to go to a foreign country for lunch on a Sunday afternoon.

palin on SNL

Tina Fey is a comedic genius.

fuckin' writers

When The Dancer and I joined the writing group, we kind of shook things up each in our own ways.

Sometimes The Dancer has a problem with subtlety. When you read someone's work, even if you don't like it, you don't say "this is a piece of crap." Or if it is (and this particular piece was), you try to say it nicely or with some humor. Then when you attack someone's writing like that, you can't be surprised when they attack you back. One night a brawl broke out and one of the guys had to act as referee and physically get between these two. Writers! I mean, we're all middle-aged and we meet in a library for god's sake. Some of us are poets. Isn't this behavior out of character? Well no. Now that I think about it, I don't know why I'm surprised. Writers can be a pretty crazy bunch, just think Larry Brown, James Ellroy, Pete Dexter, James Crumley or Hunter S. Thompson...a few of my favorites.

The Referee is a really straight-arrow guy. He has a masters degree in english or creative writing and his critiques are generally right on. But he has a lot of trouble with my use of the word fuck. Every time it shows up in my writing he writes in the margin "is this necessary?" Fuckin' A. Knowing that I like the F word has kind of allowed others in the group to use it, too. There's this one guy who at our last meeting said fuckin' this and fuckin' that all night long. It cracked me up. The poor Ref. If he's having trouble with fuck, just wait till he gets to the sexual encounters in my book. I feel like I need to clean them up just for him but then I think fuck it. He's a grown-up. If he can't handle it, he can go back to his science fiction. Which -- and I think this is interesting -- is what he is writing and through the whole 300 pages of his book there is only one sex scene and it's between two women. The fact that it is two women is not germane to the story. It's fucking kinky, if you ask me.

drinkin' and drivin'

On Sunday I had to get out of town--gas prices be damned--so I drove to the other side of the mountains to my favorite bar where I hooked up with one of my favorite barflies. He had been wanting to see me but didn't know where I was; the last he knew, I was still in Mexico. "Where is Antonia when I need her?" he lamented to his fellow barflies.

Let his tale of woe be a lesson to all of us.

A year ago his wife was driving home after having some after-work drinks and she drove into another car. No one died but everyone, including her, was seriously injured. A quarter million dollars later my friend's wife is in prison, sentenced to three years. I guess that at the hearing she entered a guilty plea and right then and there she was cuffed and hauled away, no time to say good-bye to her husband or her child. That was in March. My friend and his daughter were not allowed to visit the wife/mom until a week ago.

This is your normal hard-working family. No drug or alcohol abuse. Just one night of not correctly gauging her alcohol level and WHAM! lives changed.

Arizona does not fuck around with drinkers and drivers. Another woman known in those parts got five years for the same thing, her sentence longer because she happened to run into the sheriff's daughter who might or might not have been drinking herself.

I spent the night with my friend. We took a bottle of wine and a large pizza up to his house where I got to meet his very sweet daughter and I got to listen in on their jail-house phone call with the wife/mom. We sat outside and watched the bats dive-bomb the hummingbird feeders and listened to the coyotes singing their hearts out. I was glad I could be with my friend and his daughter. They're both doing well but it's not been easy. What is it like to walk into your home and the person you love is no longer there? Whether in jail, or worse, dead because of someone's carelessness? (I know, that's too gentle a word but how can I throw stones...?)

I'm not one to get shit-faced but certainly there were times when I drove home when I shouldn't have. I would justify it by thinking I don't have far to go and I'll only be on the frontage road. Yeah, that's what my friend's wife thought, too. Well you can bet your sweet ass those nights are long gone.

This little two-day road trip confirmed my desire to live out in the middle of the desert where coyote songs are a nightly lullaby. The trip also brought me back to reality: My yearning to return to The Home of Dashed Hopes has been dashed. Although getting spruced up, it is still a sad and sorry trailer park.

Throughout my life I have never moved back to a place once I left it and so I will not be returning to my old trailer park and probably not to that part of Arizona. Instead, I will keep going forward, anxious to see what's around the next bend.

john stewart nails the hypocrisy

conventional wisdom

I've only got time for a quick note here but I've got to say something about the conventions.

First off, I worried that the Dem convention might have been too black for some people--all that soul music--and that maybe it was too Hispanic--all those shout-outs in Spanish. And really, how embarrassingly bad did some of those white folk attendees dance? OMG! Was that purposeful, the way the camera would focus on some especially bad dancer (white dude in the yellow shirt) and then pan over to the black woman in blue from Oregon who could really move? The convention really needed a dose of Ellen DeGeneres.

Of course, in contrast, from what I've seen of the Pubes, there ain't no black folks at their convention. Well, maybe a couple.

And now, a note on McCain's VP choice: