I went down to the Westminster Infirmary...

I don’t think it was quite this antiquated, but close…

In 1957 I was at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. It’s where Winston Churchill* gave his landmark Iron Curtain Speech and it’s where I contracted the H2N2 influenza which was, as they say, going around. It, too, was a pandemic but on a much lesser scale than this scourge straight out of Revelations 6. Boy is it going around. 

The word infirmary brings to mind Dylan songs and weird scenes from foreign movies with skeletal people hacking and wracked with pain. But that’s where I was, the infirmary at Westminster, not St. James or Juarez, and when I awoke one day, at the foot of my bed was a surreal scene; backlit from an open window, gauzelike curtains floating in the breeze, were some spectral figures. My father, mother and stepfather. I recall thinking I must be dead as nothing less would bring these people together.

“What are you doing here,” I croaked.

My mother, always one to cut through the bullshit, said, “They said we’d better come. Your temperature was over a hundred and four.” At least that’s what I remember. So it caused them to drive the 150 miles, in separate vehicles I’m sure. I won’t speculate as to mood ie: relief, terror, anticipation. But they came. That was nice.

At any rate, the fever broke and I went on to a life of various accomplishments and/or disappointments. I remember sleeping in the trunk of my primered 1949 Ford during Hell Week at Westminster while my fraternity pledge colleagues dutifully scrubbed bathroom floors with toothbrushes and submitted to similar humiliations. I needed my sleep. I also didn’t wear a freshman beanie—such a rebel.

Maybe that exposure to a badass virus has given me some immunity—that and drinking bleach as That Guy suggested. Small amounts. With salt and lemon. But then that guy is lagging behind in electoral votes as I write this. The other guy, the one who put his arm around his granddaughter on national TV and said, “This is my son Beau, no stranger to politics,” is leading. And some are ticking off the points in Revelations 6 with furrowed brow and tight mouth lines.

Indigenous Peoples Month reading…

November is Indigenous Peoples month. Which I’m sure brings them a wave of joy and forgiveness for “the other peoples” having drawn up over 400 treaties and then having broken Every Single One. Well, what’s a government to do when oil or gold or real estate value is discovered where the Indigenous Peoples were force-marched to settle down? Some treaties were broken out of sheer boredom I imagine. What do you want to do today, Seth? I dunno Hiram, break some treaties?

Well, shoot. Custer Died For Your Sins. It’s a book, an Indian Manifesto, by Vine DeLoria. It’s instructive. He wrote it in the sixties and updated the foreword in 1987. He blasts stereotypes and analyzes the differences between the Indian “plight” and that of Blacks and other minorities, with irony, wit and a bit of sarcasm. I’d say this book is not for everyone, but it is. It sure is. Deloria, a Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux Indian, attended rez schools, escaped to various universties and received masters degrees and a law degree; this isn’t his only book, it’s one of more than 20, many of which advocate that the U. S. government own up to its promises and responsibilities. In that respect, Custer Died For Your Sins is for everyone. It’s got a nice index in the back, and the pages from Abernathy to Zimmerman make for some very interesting reading. You owe yourself this actual history in essays. Especially this month.

Another super nonfiction book, Lasso The Wind: Away to the New West by Timothy Egan, exposes some little known massacres (of whites by whites, among other ones) and the boondoggling and scraping bare of the west that never was The West. Mining that left huge lakes of pure poison that gain gallonage by the month and will overflow or are overflowing. (Anyone for Revelations 6?) And so on and on and on. The writing is captivating, and the facts are incontrovertible.

Hey, I’m not taking any morality stance; I’m among the guilty. So no chastisement here except maybe me on me. The covid has me in a bitchy mood. Oh, my phone just gave off a little signal; it says that JB just won the presidency. Well, maybe a new clean slate? A great Hope? Could be we’re fresh outa those but why be cynical? Especially heading into the holidays of November and December. Happy. Merry. Gobble. All that. All I want is a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun. And a new electric Hummer (for the ecosystem).

*The first known use of the term “OMG” was in a letter to Churchill over 100 years ago.

You can’t fake South, and other observations...

Watching a movie the other night on Netflix and the characters were supposed to be from Down South. It was painful hearing their deep-fried accents as they drawled and fricaseed around, being all “over yonder” and “y’all.” Tip for directors: don’t do that. Just let the actors talk normally and we’ll allow them to be from Mississippi or wherever. It’s called suspension of disbelief and it works in most cases—unless they have an Australian or Bronx accent.

 We have an accent in Kansas and Missouri, though we don’t hear it as such. It’s a midland thing. In Milwaukee I was asked where in The South I was from; I was taken aback. When I said Kansas City, the same person asked if it snowed there. Milwaukee folks add “aina?” to just about everything. “I’m going by my grandma’s, aina?” I don’t know why, they just do. Kind of like Minnesota’s “ay.” Canada, too.

The Trillbillies, front porchin’ it…

 These Kentuckians have great accents, real ones, and I like hearing them. The Trillbilly Worker’s Party. For a fun listen click here. It’s not boring. The Bitter Southerner has this to say about them: “The Trillbilly Worker’s Party podcast was started in 2017 by three radical and left-leaning friends in Whitesburg, Kentucky. Tarence Ray, Tom Sexton, and Tanya Turner talk politics  (lambasting folks on both sides of the aisle), religion, sex, class, and money, and they don't hold back. They are self-avowed propagandists, offering a distinctive anticapitalist voice with a sense of humor and a Southern twang — though your nana might want to wash their mouths out with soap!”

We interrupt this stuff for a commercial: “I Was In The Vicinity” is now available. Its the latest book of poetry by your neutrally accented friend, G. Wise, poet, sculptor, natural born social distancer. I didn’t get blurbs for this book as it’s a pain in the butt; for the blurb-seeker, for the blurb-writer. My only blurb is right here: “Not too dam bad if I do say so myself.” Me. 

 The publisher says: “Poet, Novelist, Sculptor, and raconteur Guinotte Wise returns with a gaggle of poems about choppers and barns and the archaeology of the American experience, covid-19 edition. The chaff blowing over from the pyramids of silage must lend Wise some of its dry magic, as each of these poems shimmers with grace and humor and life, in all its prickly splendor.”

 Prickly, huh? Hey, I’ll take it. Anyway, if you buy this book and don’t like it, money back guarantee within ten days.

 What else. Oh, F gave me the MasterClass for Christmas last year, and I did some Dan Brown, and Neil Gaiman, plus some other non-writing classes, really excellent. I’m in the middle of Billy Collins’ poetry class now, lesson 8 of 20, and contending with writing a typical Shakespearean sonnet without all the thou’s and thee’s. It’s three sets of 4 lines (quatrains), with a 2-line “turn” at the end. I actually dreamed about it last night and not pleasantly. So far I’ve written about a dozen poems for the class and am not half through it. BTW you might look up Billy Collins’ latest book, Whale Day. Its pretty wonderful I hear. I’ll wait for it in paperback. He’s a cool teacher and a great poet, U.S. Poet Laureate 2001-2003. Funny and dry, he’s a big jazz fan, too. Watch his great videos on Facebook. (also Peter Coyote).

 And that, as they say, is that. Won’t mention the Chiefs getting beat like a mule by some outfit from Las Vegas. Ew.

 Stay well, wear a mask when within 50 ft. downwind of germy people. Wash your hands way too much and you’ll get through it. Maybe get immune like...that guy.

 Warm wishes, g

Milestones: Claudette Colvin, Bird Parker, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Article, Montgomery Advertiser, ABC NEWS

Claudette who? Colvin. She’s the black teenager who preceded Rosa Parks by almost a year in asking to be treated with respect and equality. Same scenario; a bus seat. Same place; Montgomery, Alabama. She was cuffed and transported to a jail cell, which, for a good student with no previous trouble with the law, was pretty scary. For various reasons the NAACP chose to publicize Ms. Parks case over hers. (More wiki-info here)

 Her crime: a front-of-the-bus refusal to give up her seat to a white person in 1955. Uppity in the first degree. Book ‘em Danno. Seems crazy now, but it was so entrenched then that it was sacred Jim Crow tradition (and [unconstitutional] law) in a South that is still emerging from a duality that’s always been tough to address head-on. Non strident and considered, The Bitter Southerner is doing some cool work on that and is a Deep South voice gaining in readership.

 I was more concerned with street racing than race relations as a teen. I wasn’t into current events, but I did question authority. The Man. Nothing nearly so valid or far-reaching as Ms. Colvin’s dispute, however. Read the NPR story about her here—it’s worth the time. The reason I lead off with her is her birthday was September 5th. And she remembers the incident like it was yesterday. Her case went before The Supreme Court. Heck of a milestone.

Bronze: Robert Graham, Photo, David Basse

 Milestone two. Charlie Parker’s 100th birthday was August 29th and it’s celebrated worldwide, but also, of course, right here in Kansas City where he’s buried. It was to have been a blowout the likes of which the Jazz District hasn’t seen since the Pendergast days, but covid stole top billing. No fireworks or food trucks or porta-potties or tents everywhere. That was just a gleam in the city fathers’ billfold and it was not to be.

 A quieter tradition that started some years ago involves an esteemed KC jazz musician, David Basse, and a friend in Japan, Yoko Takemura, jazz fashion correspondent for Jazz Tokyo. She sends flowers in time for Bird’s birthday, David picks them up, puts them at the memorial site, takes a phone pic at sunrise, and sends it to her. He says, “On August 29th, I arrived about 5:50am and set the flowers in front of the Bird Memorial at 18th and Vine. Then I snapped a quick shot on my phone at sunrise. It was a sensational, calm morning.”

 Later, at the actual graveside, the segregated Lincoln cemetery in Blue Summit, David said, “... by noon, high noon, as Alaadeen has always stressed, I made it to the cemetery, less than a mile from my house in East KC. The party had begun before I’d arrived. I believe the non-event was a spontaneous affair. Folks had brought a couple of 78-record players, a couple of dogs, chickens, flowers, musical instruments and the regalia of many factions. There was even a small speaker system broadcasting Bird 78’s... they sounded fantastic.”

 And so, Charlie Parker’s 100th birthday was in the books. RIP, even though he’d rather have been buried in NY. More about the acknowledged bebop genius here.

“Those Unrelenting Destinies” (1983), conte, colored pencil

 Milestone three. Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He wrote another book last year at age 100. “Follow that!” said some fans. “Okay,” said Lawrence. Just a couple of weeks ago he opened his first one-man painting show in NYC. Born in 1919 during the Spanish Flu Pandemic, he just celebrated his 101st birthday during this current Covid-19 pandemic.

 The show, Etudes, continues at New Release Gallery in Manhattan’s Chinatown through October 2, 2020. One is reminded of his poem Sometime During Eternity, as eternity is where he seems rooted as a Supreme Court case winning activist, monumental poet, acclaimed artist, lively bookstore proprietor, banned books proponent, constantly accomplishing supertalent.

 I know what he did for me back in the 1950’s—opened my knucklehead mind to poetry and the arts, starting a lifelong appreciation for that and constantly questioning the “conventional wisdom” of then and now. Following the crowd is not in him. Standing ovation from Resume Speed, Kansas, sir. What an inspiration you were and are and will always be!

Season of the Witch

Covid, oddly distant killer cops, evil heat, record fires, the decline of coral reefs and, well, every damn thing. The election year is a comic book by R. Crumb on bad acid. There seems to be a mask vs. non-mask divide and no vaccine in sight, certainly no pill for viscerally stupid. In August, the stats for Covid 19 are so far off the charts in Kansas and Missouri that someone must be importing the stuff and sprinkling it in the water. 

I look out the window and see marvelous clouds like those N.C. Wyeth painted, bigass cumulus, and the scene is one that brings to mind childhood and how we’d watch those clouds form things and re-form from, say, a crocodile face to a dog to a buxom lady in a hat. No evidence of the evil. No sign that says Here Be Dragons.

 That was the way it appeared in L.A. looking out of my office windows on the seventh floor during an earthquake. Birds flying. Cumulus clouds. Bright blue sky behind them. And I was standing watching drawers slide open, chrome sprinkler fixtures fall out of the ceiling and bounce on the carpet. The building was yawing. But outside, all seemed normal. The birds didn’t care. The light traffic was moving. And I was feeling...off, as though the compass needle in my balance system was fluttering.

 Out there they had what they called earthquake weather; the Santa Ana winds had the same effect. More freeway shootings occurred. Animals were crazy acting. I saw a pet rabbit kick its cat friend halfway across a yard, then throw itself against the chain link fence to try to get away before an earthquake.

 Here’s an amalgamation of Didion and Raymond Chandler that sums it up:

 “The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf. The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called "earthquake weather."

"My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete. One day he would tell me that he had heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake.

 "On nights like that..." Raymond Chandler once wrote about the Santa Ana, "...every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen." That was the kind of wind it was. Whenever and wherever (it) blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea and allergies, about "nervousness," about "depression." In Los Angeles some teachers do not attempt to conduct formal classes during a Santa Ana, because the children become unmanageable.”

I came home where it’s “safe” and a couple of years later a tornado blew our barn roof off. Before it happened, I felt something like I’d felt before Santa Anas. So did the horses. They bunched nervously in the loafing shed and kicked at the north wall.

 Didion wrote, “A few years ago an Israeli physicist discovered that not only during such winds, but for the ten or twelve hours which precede them, the air carries an unusually high ratio of positive to negative ions. No one seems to know exactly why that should be; some talk about friction and others suggest solar disturbances. In any case the positive ions are there, and what an excess of positive ions does, in the simplest terms, is make people unhappy. One cannot get much more mechanistic than that”

 I don’t feel that way today, just pissed because the weather people said it would be less humid today and it’s still heavy “air you can wear” as the KSHB weather lady put it. I despise humidity. And I still have to wade through it for my daily Fitbit quota. What brought all this on was “Season of the Witch” on my iPod. Bloomfield, Kooper and Stills. “Season of the Witch” is weird, like the times. Perfect accompaniment for how I feel.

 I recommend the album, mainly for its “His Holy Modal Majesty,” a nine minute display of musical pyrotechnics that never fails to whirl me into another place than this hellscape of peurile politics, bigotry and typhoid Marys leaping out to spray you with whatever they’re carrying.

 To better times. G

Thompson For Sheriff

Had Hunter Thompson become sheriff (and he almost did) I’d still be living in Aspen, probably in an abandoned car or a cardboard box in the farrier’s barn who offered the only job I could find at that time. Apprentice farrier. It was on a bulletin board in one of the few ungentrified greasy spoons left in the entire county. I might still be skiing at my advanced creaky age, but I doubt that; more likely nursing the dregs of a bottle of Schnapps tossed aside by someone with a five hundred dollar season pass and a Canada Goose parka.

You see, if Hunter and Freak Power had come out on top, I had promised myself I would move to Aspen. I’ve made dumber decisions. Much.

But Hunter didn’t take over the law enforcement of Aspen and Pitkin County, and the fizzling remnants of Freak Power confined itself to the Hotel Jerome and Owl Farm. I didn’t know Hunter but did know his right-wing adversary/nemesis, Mayor Guido Meyer. Liked him, too. Stayed at his motel, and his dog, Butch, attached himself to me to the point where he spent nights in my room. Had Hunter won the Sheriff’s race, Butch and I would have volunteered and been factotums at the Sheriff’s Department. Runners for donuts, coffee, rum and bud. Who knows what that future held? Different paths taken.

Probably for the better, since Hunter left Owl Farm in a spectacular cannonade of music and fireworks. I wrote a poem about it, Hunter in the Sky with Cordite,and it was published in Heartland! (exclamation point theirs) and here it is! (exclamation point mine).

 Hunter in the Sky with Cordite

By accident or design he took his life

and turned Owl Farm to icon, Johnny

Depp and friends shot his ashes into

the sky and swirled them like a flock

of birds or leaflets a ticker tape parade

of ball-drop confetti that came to rest

on aspen meadows, thickets and on

the backs of leaping deer who took

it to the roads and threw themselves

at trucks in throes of actuarial herd-

thinning and very little thought to the

gonzo genius whose ashes rode them

to their own felo de se in headlights

grille and fender mauling endgame.

Deer aside, the wake is the thing and

this one was classic HST red white

and blue lit the sky and then the famed

flamed exitus flagrante in preplanned

thundrous salute a single salvo that

said I left the way I lived, out of my

way you bastards and a long cigarette

holder whipped through the night sky

slamming into place on the bear Ursa

Major pointing forever at Polaris the

star that guides lost sailors, writers,

bikers and artists, those voyagers who

step into the unknown with nothing

but their try, their lashed-together

boats of sticks and hubris to float

them all the way to Styx and maybe

who the hell knows, to Elysium.

 Anyway, they sent him off in a way he’d have endorsed, and ad perpetuam memoriam.

Top left: Brilliant campaign poster. Top right: Ajax. Bottom right: Viva Montesa and a bike ski rack that I never saw the likes of again.

I have an Aspen wall within sight of my writing desk in the loft of my wife’s studio. It bears three items; Hunter’s campaign poster, a painting by an artist named Bert in Milwaukee, and a poster for Montesa. The fellow named Bert was an old school art director who wore a smock and regarded the rest of us as silly, or at least I got that impression. One day he was gone, but I had the painting. It reminded me of a run on Ajax called Lazy Boy. And I saw the Montesa poster in a clothing store in Aspen and had to have it because of a bike I’d seen on the street. They said not for sale, it was part of their decor. I persisted. Later they sold it to me for five bucks, which would be about a hundred in today’s money.

I’d seen a Montesa scrambler with knobby tires in Aspen during a ski trip; it was outfitted with a home made ski rack in which the skis were perpendicular behind the rider. I liked that. It was parked on the street in front of The Chart House. That guy was a serious resident. And no doubt lively. Viva Montesa.

The anarchists were taking over, or giving it a serious try and they liked to ski, drink, and drive on the rim. I felt a strong attraction to their sanguine ways. Res ipsa loquitur.