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I’ve been called away from this blog by becoming obsessed over editing “Sojourner,” a historical fiction based on the Chinese experience in California, Gum Shan, Mountain of Gold, during the gold rush. I will eventually put up the query I used to hawk the book; I believe it still holds up. It’s a quest novel which reveals my own philosophical questions about intention and meaning. It was my first stab at a novel and it holds up pretty well, considering that it cooled off for almost three decades. What I bring to it now is a more mature self. You know, reader, one has to trust oneself. The book stands. The bones are very good, and it will become the next book I publish. After that, “Gruffworld,” my science fiction fantasy that deals with the awakening of intelligence, to use Krishamurti’s words, and a psychoanalytic approach to loss, abandonment, and all those nagging themes of existence. The first chapter, “Covenant,” which was published, is now archived for you in the Pages section of this blog.

“Sojourner” is so cold now that I can easily spot the grammatical errors, the lack of my skills back then, the need to amplify, the need to cut severely so that pace is kept at a regular beat. I enjoy editing: revise . . . revise . . . revise. The secret is in that. How much to cut is the art of finesse and I am still learning that. Jane Holt, my colleague, fiance and editor, likes the book very much and she will give it the final read. Jane will also write an introduction. If you read her introduction to Down to a Sunless Sea, you will appreciate her lean and pragmatic style; she thinks the book through thoroughly before she writes. And I am sure that her introduction to “Sojourner” will be terrific. She sees things in me and in my writing which are unknown to me. And so what else is new about life?

I’d like to share some managerial issues about revising this particular book. It is idiosyncratic, but maybe my sharing of it might serve you down the line. The book is about 200 pages. I feel I need to go over it, of course, before I submit it to an editor. And I was thinking of having it typed up and put on a disk as this saves time in all aspects. However, I know me. I decided, now that I have some facility with a computer, to type in the manuscript myself, perhaps taking a month to do so. It has proven successful so far and not a little bit exciting. That is why I have not blogged for a few days. I am absorbed in the rewriting.

What I do is take a chapter or two and quickly edit it. I mark it up, etc. Going to the computer, I then type in the chapter and while that is going on I continue to touch up the chapter. So the book becomes an intimate expression of my present comprehension of what to do with it. Consequently, I’ve dropped out pages, edited out “leeches,” those words that are repetitvely dull or unnecessary. I always strive to say more with as few words as possible — think Elements of Style. I then print out 10 0r 15 pages at a time, staple them and put them into a folder. What I will do next is a more careful editing. It is easier to go over a short sample that has been “cleaned” and “polished” by me than an entire book. In this way I will burnish the samples. After all that, I will enter the corrections on the master copy and I know full well I will still tinker, as I should. The whole process probably will take six weeks if that. As it is now, I am moving furiously ahead, caught up in my own fiction. It works for me. It may not work for you. Remember: being a disciple sucks, it will always suck.

While all this is going on, I will be interviewed for the first time on radio, something that came my way by being a member of the Society of Southwestern Authors. More about that down the line. I am looking forward to an extended interview with me by Derek Alger, one of the editors at PIF magazine (online). You can access that under Links. Secondly, I am expecting the Green Valley News to publish an interview with me sometime in June. I have no idea what the reporter made of me. I am expecting distortions, and why not. I often distort and dissemble on purpose. Finally, you will observe an increase of sites under Links. They are reviews of my two books, mostly the short story collection. I am fine tuning them. If you can’t get access just type in the blogspot and google. The reviews are archived if not recent.

Additonally, I submitted “Bitter Brown Shoes” and “Present Tense” to the SSA contest, results come in October. Previously I won honorable mention for “Mortise and Tenon,” which is in my short story book. I won first place in 2005 for “Ms. Foley, With Gratitude,” in the category of personal essay/memoir whioch was published in “The Story Teller,” a publication of the Society of Southwestern Authors. What I submitted this time was an essay about cameras as remembrances of things past — see previous blog with that title. I combined that with another blog and worked hard on it until seamless. It is an essay about loss, time and reminiscence — think “Rosebud.” And they are away, the gods will decide. What I have gotten from this is that I resurrected previous unfinished work and applied what talents I have now; I more than refreshed them. I reconsidered them. I believe they work now as stories.

And that brings you up-to-date, dear reader.

Mishka, if I recall his name right, was my grandmother Flora’s cousin,  the first man, I ever saw walk with a cane. He was courtly, light-complexioned, and I believe he was a Hebrew teacher. There was the air of the scholar about him. And he wore a hat. It is all so strange that there are individuals in our lives that enter and leave, with very few details after that. He now strikes me as someone I could have had deep conversations with. I don’t know if he was ever married and had children. He just came into my life, popped in, from time to time. He was a visitor.

One evening he took me as a very young boy, perhaps 4 or 5, to the boardwalk in Brighton Beach; it could have been 1944 or 1945. I have no real idea. Chronology is for rememberers. In any case, as I heard the roar of the surf in the darkness that lay beyond the beach, I asked Mishka why there are stars in the heavens. I just did. I asked him. I don’t recall his response, perhaps a mild hesitation. What I do remember almost 59 years later was the animated quality he expressed when he told grandma Flora of his talk with me, that, to wit, I was a very special boy — and I was kin. As I look back what I feel I should have asked, or, perhaps, in effect I did ask, “Mishka, why are the heavens on fire?”

In this anecdote is my passion, as emblematic as Jordan’s compassion for the Elephant Man. I question. I question everything. Most of my life I was conditioned, as is our way as creatures. I am all about questions, passionate questions. It is my kettle of fish. It is my fate, a destiny given to me. I am not cursed. I am blessed. It is what I am, what I do best:

what is fire?

I do not know

Why is there fire?

That is a better question

I cannot answer

You need not

Better to ask another question

What if I seek an answer?

Why bend the question to your mind?

I don’t understand

A question is an inviolate thrust into the unknown

But. . .

Let it be. . .Let it be

I question everything, and everything doesn’t say go away; it could care less. I ask because it pleases me to do so. I ask not requiring an answer. Keep asking a question about a passion or concern and eventually it evanesces before your mind. So concerned are we with prima facies, with results, with answers, that the real beauty of a question, like a butterfly unfurling its wings to the sun’s warmth, never gets its chance to bask.

Before I write this blog, some recent news. In June, Pif Magazine (online), Derek Alger, editor, will publish an extensive interview with me. A local newspaper in Green Valley also interviewed me and that will appear later in June. I will keep you apprised. The reporter grew up on the East Coast, so we understood one another, here in this geriatric Disneyland.

When my son , Jordan, and I watched “The Elephant Man” in 1980, at the age of 4, he asked me why this poor creature (this man) was being dealt with so cruelly by his fellow human beings. You give it words, for a four-year-old can say it very tersely. I answered. I told the truth to him. As I see the movie again this afternoon, as the doctors objectify him, point to his deformities, I realize that my son saw through all this societal (The Emperor Has No Clothes) crap. I worry about my son, as any father should, but I am honored  to know him. His persona, the great crap shoot, is made until he ends his days. And so is mine. My step-daughter, half-jokingly, half-seriously, calls this gloomy Gus who married her mother (divorced in 2006), “Sunshine.”

The secret of “Sunshine” is that I am a very hurt human being — and so what. We are all very hurt human beings, riven by life, death and dramatic loss. And unlike our “healers,” the self-help shamans, I will not accept nor abide their “cures,” their glib bromides. Life is much too hard to be “cured” so easily. Sadly I like my life hard; it is all I know and have. Unlike the Elephant Man whose deformities hid a grand soul, a kind essence, I wear mine within. “Sunshine” is an apt name for me with all its negative connotations. I am not a moonbeam caught in a jar.

So I bear my crabbed personality, knowing within it is a shell, my pretense for my pain. It is so long in growing, so comfortable in fit, that I fear I could not do without it. Ah, the defenses we construct for ourselves! The way to my heart is a love serendipitous, for all of us need — with word, especially — to be cradled. Hold me with words and it is as if you actually touch me. Ah, and then the choice of words. One needs to be a poet to help the suffering, a poet without rhyme or meter, but a poet nevertheless. I have searched all my life looking, unwittingly, I must say, for the poet. Isn’t this in some way why we ask that words be said over us when we come to die?

Last night at the Vistoso Commerce loop exit on to Oracle Road, I stopped the car and put off the lights. Dozens of small fires crept down the ridges of the Catalinas. It seemed a fitting salute to the July Fourth Holiday several days away. This morning the gullies and ravines that lead down to the foothills and then to Oracle Road were filled with smoke, as if a giant corncob pipe was puffing out blasts. The crests from about 3 to 4 miles away seemed charred, like burnt popcorn. The heat today was intense even in the morning hours and I came home after running a few errands to pay bills. Mt. Lemmon’s fire, we are told, is now contained. Of course, Mt. Lemmon hasn’t a care in the world. The only analogue I have for it is cutting hair; imagine if we felt that shearing. I view the universe as unfeeling as scissored tresses, a space-time continuum of monstrous indifference. I see no meaning to it all, which only serves me to become more vigilant with my fellow sentient fools as they run to and fro, establishing religions, creating systems, rule-making, and all the idiocies of the human race.

I imagine societal efforts are very much like putty-filler. We continue to fill in holes in ourselves and our communities as if this effort counts. It does not. We are busy little bees who can’t let it be, no pun intended. It took some time before the Beatles “Let It be,” got through our sullen and stubborn minds, if it ever did. We just can’t resist tinkering with others, ourselves and the planet. Madonna, for one, continually changes from one video to another; by chance last night I saw her in the latest disguise. A question — doesn’t she really have a boy’s musculature with a face-shifting attractiveness? A thousand years hence, as we flip through images of this time, she will remind us of the pages in comic books of yore, the pages we never read, the filler between stories, the pages that advertised come-ons to the adolescent mind. Poor Madona, curbside detritus. And don’t get me on to Jennifer Lopez — the rear end that changed the world in 10 days. What would Lenin have given for a ride on that Ninotchka? She is a body part, inanimate, like Ulysses’s sirens, calling out to inanimates in general.

I scurry about, irascible soul that I am. I mumble and grumble to myself. I don’t like most people. I am quiet when I have to be. I don’t aggress others. I am not a socializer. I am affabe, but not too mucy\h so that I kiss up. I don’t like others who kiss up. I am in a constant state of dislike — I find that “healthy,” for i see through, at times, the bullshit we call human interaction. I have an enormous crap detector behind my eyes. I listen well. And then I really listen, depending on the the person before me, mensch, schmuck, jerk, fool, brown-noser or nincompoop. Good people I attend to.

This bristling affect, this edgy persona, this near nastiness is how I greet the world. I couldn’t care a whit about its history. I use to. I see no point to that now. It is how I manage myself and the world. I couldn’t about whether or not it gets in my “way,” or makes life difficult for me — and others, often kin. It is not an orneriness wanting to remain ornery. I think it is much more. It is my kettle of fish. An octopus spits out ink. I spit out this self. I could never entirely tease out its roots, or reduce it to a pablum of insights and interpretations. It is not reductive.

Simply said, I have come into this persona as a bud enters into bloom. Unplanned, without design, evolving and evolved, my puny efforts to canalize its positive and negative features have led only to cosmetic affects. Like oil and vinegar in a cruet, after awhile, they precipitate out and rest one liquid upon another. The most we can do in life is to vigorously shake the cruet, from time to time, to integrate the flavors; but who are we kidding? After decades we precipitate out again — look at the infant and the child: fast forward 60 years. Same child in the same adult. All that growing and human effort for nought. We are much like fields of grain, more imposing as a group fluorishing than as an individual head of grain. And, ultimately, all this grain becomes a box of rice krispies.

There’s a haze along the ridge, Pusch Ridge, as they call it after an early settler of Oro Valley. Small plumes of smoke sully the slopes for a few miles like a sulphuric mountain acne. The heat of the day compounds all this, so that the light itself seems to have been smudged by an artist’s gum eraser. After a half hour at a Verizon store, bombarded by high tech verbal jazz, I am fit to be tied and speed back to Rancho Vistoso Boulevard where my condo rental is. I swallow cold seltzer and take a few herbals for my enlarged prostate. The heat saps strength and I feel spent. Not much comes to mind at the moment, and I am waiting to be surprised as to what will flow from me. It feels good not tohave designs on myself, to cede control, to let the machinery just hum along to do its job.

Mt. Lemmon has no consciousness. It is an inanimate there. And what happens to it is of no importance to it. The mountain affects us, esthetically, geographically, and so on. It is our habitat, much like the earth itself. Time can do with it as it will; we can set fire to it if we choose, or inhabit parts of its wilderness. It simply is. We identify with, we project upon it. We can make it part of an ecological ethic, if we decide to. Awareness will never dawn upon its crest. It has no meaning other than what intentions we give it. Mt. Lemmon has no present meaning, no past, and not future. It is an inanimate there.

The more I contemplate the mountain, try to get inside its inanimateness, the more I cast light upon myself. Several times this week — at a bank, with a community management office — I’ve had to prove I exist, that I reside at a specific address, and any variations thereof. The fact that I’m not at my residence, but at a nearby rental until a paint job is completed, makes the authorities more and more adamant. They speak of identity fraud as a frightful and on the rise crime; they bridle when I say it is a harassment of a kind, given the circumstances. And have you noticed the voices  all these young women have, the rpm of a Milwaukee drill. Rigid, calcified, poorly educated, their orgasms conditioned to go off like a bank vault alarm, orderly, regularly, swiftly — smoothly calibrated — the brain dead zombies of corporate Amerika. “You have a nice day now,” they croon. Their good-bys a kind of hideous and unreal expectation. What if I don’t want a nice day? Pressure. Sometimes I can get under the nails of the suicidally inclined and almost taste their life-weariness in this grossly conditioned culture. To feel intensely in America is to teeter-totter on the edge of doing away with oneself. Mt. Lemmon and many of the sentients that observe it are inanimate. When I deal with an inanimate sentient, it is as much as expecting Mt. Lemmon to rear up on its granite loins, and yell “Fire!”

I can sense-feel their annoyance with this old cocker, this disruptive soul, this “grumpy old man,” this Walter Matthau who is in their faces. And why do I identify with good old Matthau? In short, he sees through shit. And he wants nothing of it. Moreover, he implicitly, often explicitly, demands an adherence to some reasonable value system. W.C. Fields, who for a part of his young life lived in a hole in the ground, saw through the shit as well. The anarchic Fields knew very well that governments kill men, democratic ones do it with hypocrisy and guile, not quite as honest as a good dictatorship. Perhaps a well-intended sucide says more about the failure of culture than it does about its victim. Thus, suicide can be an act of courage, of an inner tiredness with the struggle of getting through to others, of getting through the night.

Make no light of it, these guardians at the gate are mean-spirited, stony, cold little shits. The geriatric fears is that when he comes to pass, the medicos at the hospital have the same attitude, a “by-pass” attitude to this elderly piece of “junk” they are taking care of. When was the last time we each met a human being who had enought spit, hair and gristle, to be with us when the going got tough. When my wife died in 1999 in an awful car crash, her closest friend, and at nurse at that, made the grandest commitment to be there for me, my son and my hospitalized daughter, also a victim of the same accident. In short, she faded, couldn’t be found, disappeared, in effect. Her cowardice was appalling, her explanations for her absence weak, absurd, lacking incredibility. When it came down to crunch time, she folded. I have prided myself on the fact that I don’t fold. So our friendship was rendered asunder. Much like a Jewish rabbi and Catholic priest who cannot agree on first principles — he rose or he didn’t rise? On this we part. Stand tall, don’t fold — or don’t stand tall. After all I lost a wife and almost my second daughter. This bag of sand had lost nothing, for she had no inner grit. She was an inanimate soul. I thought there was more to her. There wasn’t. She was a cacophony of Mes. And I and my remaining family was betrayed. I recall now as I write how her daughter called upon me to help her as her mother was crying hysterically, for she was in the middle of a divorce, and had been cheated upon. I remember how her own daughter could not handle her mother’s melt down and left, (it must run in the family) leaving me to hold and soothe her mother who had apparently lost it. I expected nothing in return. I did this as a friend, as a human being not wanting to see such pain. Like a rat, her daughter fled. I stayed to pick up the pieces. Years later I learned I had to pick up my own pieces — don’t we all?

She tried to reach my kids to contact me, when she thought better of it; I would not let her in. In a note, I advised her to let us be and aptly diagnosed her behaviors as “parasitic.” She later went on to become a social worker. To all her clients, run. She is invasive, she will leave you bereft like an empty shell. As the psychoanalyst Robert Langs would have it, a disturbed therapist — and there are many — will drive his or her patient nuts.

As one of Langs interviewees in his book Madness and Cure, I should know. I was Mr. Edwards in that book. I fought off a disturbed shrink — and won out. And the ultimate irony was that I, in turn, became a therapist. Like the old cliche of the wounded soldier falling in love with his nurse, I chose not to do that and to become a psychotherapist!

Is it in Hamlet that the phrase “sterner stuff” is used? I like to think that I am of that fabric; for there is something in me that has always admired antique courage, the 300 Spartans versus Xerxes, Shadrach, Meschach and Abendigo, Churchill, in our time, and so on. It is a folly of mine, but I prefer, in fantasy, to think I am capable of a beau geste. If it is in mind, it is real close to actuality. I am sometimes pressed by the exigencies of good acts in mind so that intentionality takes over and I use what expertise i have to bring them about. On my stone, write: He was there. However, I am not Mt. Lemmon

I’ve had little time to post a blog until now. Why? Down to a Sunless Sea has won an Indie Excellence FINALIST Book Award. It it also placed as a semi-finalist for the Reader Views Literary Awards. So, I composed a pr letter and forwarded the news to reviewers, bloggers and friends. This Monday morning I was notified by Wheatmark, Inc, a print on demand publisher which I highly recommend — email me if you want more information, that I was a finalist in the “popular fiction” category of the 2008 Arizona Book Awards, sponsored by the Arizona Book Association. The publishers are given the awards as well as the writers. It is prestigious in Arizona.

I urge the writers out there to submit their works to contests; the rewards are pleasurable and may lead to increased sales. Poets & Writers, online, offers the best listing, by month, of yearly contests.

I took a short story out of mothballs, ”Bitter Brown Shoes,” and reworked it considerably; it was in suspended animation for about two decades, and I have observed that my skills are sharper now and my self-knowledge as well. The story is very good, to me, and I will submit it to the Society of Southwestern Authors contest which ends on 31 May. You can get the application on the web. Another story, “Present Tense,” has been thickened and it too will be submitted. What might interest you as a reader is that I took two blogs, one on cameras as remembrances of things past and another from my memoir on Mt. Lemmon and conflated them into a personal essay which I like, which is all that matters. So, two short stories and one essay are cooling down for their final editing and off they go.

Even the writing on this blog has led to creative expression. For the writer blogging keeps your hand in your craft and for the reader it may lead to observing how to shoe the horse. Writers are farriers.

It was an aimless game with a competitive edge to it, much like the incessant, monotonous drive of Monopoly played for long Saturday afternoons. It whiled away the time and required some finesse with a pocketknife; we all carried them in the 50s, as much a symbol of maturity as of masculinity, symbolic of our emulation of our fathers and as Freudian as one could get.

I recall how i stretched my young finger down the spine of the blade, after countless attempts at discovering methods that would control the flight and drive the feral blade deep into the earth. A pause was required over the land; concentration flowed from the eye into coordination of the hand and the downward, firm thrust of a knife propelled through space until a soft thud was not only heard but sensed, like the sweet spot at the end of a bat. Nothing was as fine to the eye or as comforting to the spirit as the lean and precise cut a sharp blade made in the soil. Upon removing the blade after the thrust from its earthen grip, a stroke or two across one’s dungarees cleansed the tool for a repeat throw.

I drew a large box as square as I could have it with my penknife. Another line bisected it. In the left side a single initial for the other player, on the right side I cut in my signature. The knife was thrown. If it landed upright and sliced itself into the soil, I drew a line with the knife to the perimeter of the square and annexed this territory to my estates. If the knife was cast again and this time it tripped, landing on its side, the other player had his turn. In this way land was divided and sectioned off, odd lots divvied up. I managed to keep what I owned only if the heel of my sneaker fit into the property remaining. Before the game was over the ground had been smudged and rubbed and irritated with sneaker scuffs.

The skills involved were manifold and as patently complex and miniaturized as the contents of an opened watch case. This game of early youth grounded in the incessant soothing of the body — that allayed anxiety other than to create effort — gave sleek shape to growing up — a rhythm in the self, a paralleling to the drift of late afternoons after school or the somber passing of reluctant seasons. “Land” was a game for all seasons, when the earth gave way to an intruder; when conglomerate could be easily upturned from the cloying grip of soil and separated out so that the field might be plowed for our awaiting weaponry.

“Land” was much more than a game, more than a rite of passage, or an index to a season’s efforts by the young; it was context, it bound the young to the soil, it gave the urban young child a relationship to what was often unheeded, the natural order of things. In the “lots” between buildings, the pastures of the inner city, we shepherded ourselves and became contiguous with nature. By playing “Land” we caught the cycle of a part of life, swept away by its spume into adulthood. What “Land” was about was a tie to our comrades, the camaraderie of the new chum. The obsessiveness of “land” was in its repetitiveness, that it began and that it ended, and that in its middle phase curious and fascinating divisions were made: much like the cruelly dispassionate slicing up of a long worm, after a rainfall, vastly more intriguing than either one of its ends.

The other symbiotic game that created internal patterns as complex as an equinox was marbles, spheroids of colors and crystals, of dimensions, that required manual dexterity and the machinations of an Eastern potentate. From the fistula of the hand, the orb departed, expelled from its cradle by the thumb. The intensity by which it was grasped in its nexus of thumb and finger, its omphalos, was directly related to its effect on the playing fields, often the same ground that been cleared for “Land.”

A small crater was excavated and smoothed out by hand. Several steps away we tossed our favorite agate to get close to the rim of the crater, to position ourselves for first or second shot. From here we aimed diligently to smack the other players’ marbles, and like atoms smashing into one another the sweet-smacking sound of glass joining glass cracked acrossed our bodies as we crouched down on one knee. With glee and greed — as primal as pirates — we pocketed the marbles we struck. Like peasants we each had sacks or pockets for stashing our colored glass. The bubbling racket in our pants’ pockets gave way to the possessional feeling of small eruptions across our calves. The feel of marbles against the thigh was comforting, for we had increased our treasure. We relished each cascade.

As we stationed ourselves from angles, aimed and shot with fervor, it was as if neutrinos from the bowels of space shot across our fields; we were gods playing craps for keeps. The physicality of the game, the relationship between eye, target and hand were consummate skills rarely mastered. The marble itself, its pits and pocks, its surface geometry, the soil itself, worked against all best intentions. And we gradually learned about the perversity of inanimate matter; patience brewed; and we hunkered down and waited for amuscade. Much of later life was contained in the randomness, coincidence, luck and stealth of marble playing.

An instinctual as skittering a flat stone across a lake’s surface or casting a lazy line into complacent waters, the games of youth were preparatory. An inner sense of how to spin a rubber ball into a bounced curve or snare backhand, a grounder with an outstretched glove, were seemingly innate givens, human theorems our bodies had metabolized forever. When I am with my children the natural sirens of youth compel me to pass on the arcane lore of my youth; when we fabricated games from mind and imagination; when many toys were handmade from the flora and fauna of the streets; when simple games took years of complex devotion to master; when. . . .

On the one hand, if we are somewhat aware, up and running, the corner cut man having restored some life in us, we struggle to put off being conditioned. While we struggle, as we haltingly catch our breath, we walk into some awareness, some sense of self that happily creates doubt and dissonance in us so that we can clearly see our way.

Before we can get started, we often die. Timing is beyond our control. So much of our lives are contingencies that we cannot lift ourselves into flight. What I like about Sisyphus is his realization that the gods, the mountain, the hernia-giving boulder, the curse itself, the judgment made on him was all bullshit. What mattered was not only the struggle, as he defined it –most important, but an inner resiliency he did not choose — it was a happenstance, as I interpret it; another man would have cracked.

The myth is a happenstance. We are all different kinds of happenstance. It is what we do with the cards given us; a little bit more than that needs to be added. Who we are is a lucky break in instances; we really, like our shape, our blood chemistry, have little do with our uniqueness. Fred Astaire was a magnificent dancer; it was a given, he just had presence of mind to hone his craft. Many of us have it, but don’t know what to do with it, and many of us have no idea we have it, and so effort is never made to exercise talents. And some of us are just blown off the surface of the earth, to fertilize, perhaps, another errant human being in the making.

While we play craps with our lives, some of us don’t get that we are crapshooters. Randomness drives people nuts; order and sense sedates us. I understand, I feel, the terror beneath disorder, but my reading of life, is that I can drop dead right now. Given that, to plan life inordinately is to be not a little psychotic. To count on anything in life is to be unwise, and not a little naive. To live life moment to moment sounds bravely wise, to me, but such moments are not guaranteed. What is left, I suppose, is to wake up in Oro Valley, look through the window slats, see Mt. Lemmon smoking, feel the sun’s rays, and to thank chance — not god — and circumstance, for the granting of another day, often unlived, but grateful for the allowance nature has granted us. Sometimes we have to trust in nothing.

To be free to agonize is better to me than not to be free, enjoying all the conditional glut a market economy can afford. Flick on the tube, stand 20 paces away, fine tune your mind and what do you behold: pollution. I was in Target the other night browsing for a sunshade to ward off the Tucson sun and I passed several 10 or 11-year-olds, no older, holding pistol-like grips in their hands, playing games on a console that had several screens. I made a judgment quickly which is my way and I recalled how playing marbles held me entranced on a different level, for marbles combined winning and losing — greed, but they also involved skill at a much slower pace. It was tactile, not visual — that’s not exactly accurate; one did need to assess the positions on the playing field, measuring perspectives. Whatever I saw at Target was fast time versus slow time, durational versus exponential time, quickness as opposed to thinking and evaluating. I saw my “old” time, and did not favor this “new” time. I do not care for it, but as Krishnamurti said, that is: what is.

One generation unfolds into another, like ocean foam crashing against evolutionary reefs and rocks. I go into a dither when I come close to expressing the swooning, reeling effect of being alive without a designed purpose. What fools we are to try to “carve” out some meaning in the ridiculously short spans we inhabit. All is nought, yet our very DNA compels us, like the waves, to go smashing into something. Are we fleshened cyclotrons? Are we matter examiners? Or does it not matter? Or are we deluded, as if all about us is matter-of-fact? Hi-diddle, hi-diddle, I go.

What comes next is not up to me. I cannot say, predict, know or sense as I write words, how they might conceptualize themselves. I suppose any writer is ultimately an orderer of what flows, a word-shaper. Some shape and order better than others. What intrigues me is the idea that the flow within, the innateness of the writer, may be more interesting than what he turns it into. So Hemingway and Doestoevsky — one a great stylist and shaper of words; the other more profound internally than the other, but not as felciitous. Grandiosely, I feel that my art does not equal who I am; so here I am a ventriloquest’s dummy and he moves his lips too much. Charlie McCarthy versus Jerry Mahoney. One, a smartass salacious, woodpecker, the other a buoyant soul with better voice control. So I write what I have to say, not too happy with the artifice I can muster. I just put it out there.

If I had to write like another, Nikos Kazantzakis would be the one. When he describes rain hitting mother earth in the desert, you feel the warm pulse of each drop. He had the balls to continue the Odyssey in two volumes of verse and by all accounts equaled Homer. And his Report to Greco is the greatest confessional of the 20th century. “Reach what you cannot, Nikos,” his stern, Cretan grandfather urges him. And he met that task in his spiritual life. An amazing soul.

I am always stirred by the spiritually great, how they transcend without the mealy-mouth urgings of the Dyers, Chopras, and the Dr. Phils. “Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break!” This is authentic, not a namby-pamby platitude. There is a picture of Wayne Dyer on the cover of one of his books in which he looks deeply and spiritually entranced. The question to ask: how many crisp hundreds are in his billfold?

I am watching a made for TV film, “Caesar,” on TNT while I write and the sponsor is Immodium, the film a farrago of logorrhea and diarrhea. I digress.

As I returned home from visiting my sister on Oracle Road, I could see the plumes of smoke on the Catalinas, small ashtrays littering the hillsides. I’ve heard that they are making a breakfire, and all will be well, the fire contained. I passed a man and his parked car. He had a tripod set up and he was taking pictures of the mountains. A recorder and a rememberer, I imagine. What will he say when he shows his photos of this fired up mountain? That he was there; that he captured a once-in-a-lifetime event — when next will Mt. Lemmon be aflame, smoking; that he captured, for all time, what his eyes and events had brought him to. He is indeed a metaphor for his own life; can he capture it, shag it, net it, make it utile and efficacious?

If only we could encapsulate on silver nitrate what our lives are; better yet, instead of recording might not we live it, whatever we are capable of living. We live as if in lieu of. Perhaps we might be better human beings if we acted out of amnesia. I am not so sure about memory; it feels like an inhibitor.

When we lose our loved ones, a wife, a daughter, as I have, we are destroyed — if we feel. We become molecular dust, incorporeal, flattened, deadened, motes. And the gravitas of time itself sabotages our intensities, our unwillingess to “get on” with life and things. We begin to forget. Time creates ruins of the lost loved one in mind, crumbled desert palaces. An Atlantis is created in mind, a lost, wondrous city. I’ve heard mourners bewail the passing of time for it was the final death knell of their dear one. I feel we lose our dear ones more than once. Erosive memory kills the odors, perfumes, the shapes, the face, and oh, the voice, of the one we knew so well, so intimately. I cannot remember my mother’s voice who I lost at 20; 43 years have silenced it. Is that why we have all this videotaping and recording?

We create archives of our loved ones amidst the vibrancy of their lives so that years hence we can review them alive and heartily well on tape and CD s — ghastly. We do not engage them while alive, for we are disengaged; and we remember them as images or pixels on computers. I think it was Mailer who said that film was, in effect, death. George Raft refused to watch his movies because he knew they showed him aging — good for you, George. At least you didn’t buy into this ghoulishness, although vanity played a part no less.

Massive vaults of archives exist for the 20th century, and what will we learn from all this? It is beyond comprehension how this visual glut will be transmogrified into some new kind of learning — or insight, perhaps intelligence. I will not argue the case. I only feel that visual satiety is like eating a Gummy Bear — of little nutritional value. Someone recently asked me how he can stop being so anxious; he wanted an answer, an anodyne now. When I told him his anxiety had value, for he was attentive and vigilant as a housepainter, he passed it over. He didn’t hear me. And when I said that you don’t go around anxiety, but wisdom says you go through it, I had completely lost his attention. Calling Wayne Dyer! And so he will continue until life, relationship or event does him in and he sees a little, or he is never awakened and he ends his life with a primer and then a final coat of Benjamin Moore flat.

I’ve had no chance to post since I was visited by my son; however,while he was here a very fine review of Down to a Sunless Sea came in from Ascent Aspirations, David Fraser, editor. See: http://www.ascentaspirations.ca/downtoasunlesssea.htm. And Edwin Turner at Biblioklept interviewed me via emails. See http://biblioklept.org/2008/05/09/the-biblioklept-interview-mathias-freese/

The more significant news is that I placed as a Finalist for THE NATIONAL INDIE EXCELLENCE BOOK AWARDS 2008. As the announcement says: “A publicity and marketing campaign announcing the award results is already underway and will continue throughout early June. At the Book Expo America in Los Angeles, we will be mailing and e-mailing a press release to all registered media at the event, usually around 700 editors and producers. We also encourage you to promote your award to your media and company contacts.”

And, of course, book award stickers can be purchased to promote the award itself on the book cover.

In an earlier blog I suggested to the writers who follow this blog that entering contests is one way to get recognition. I entered 10 and have placed as finalist and semi-finalist in two of them.The best listing of contests is on the Poets and Writers website. It is done by month.

If I can make the arrangements with my publisher, Wheatmark, Inc, I will probably go to the Expo just to hunt spoors of other writers and editors, schmooze. It is part of the joy I am experiencing at this moment in my life. Later on today, hopefully, I will post my usual idiosyncratic blog.