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The Highs and Lows

In some few things, I envy the kids.

Not in most things. C'mon. Looking at the world that the Boomers are exiting it seems obvious that there is a giant gaping failure of imagination and action. I'm a few years too young to be a Boomer but older than most of what is thought of as GenX and I've known since elementary school that we were pissing in our own beds. I can't imagine what certainty lurks in the hearts of todays tweens and teens. Sorry, kids. We f'd this one up.

But kids these days can at least access themselves better than whatever generations surround me. And I woke up this morning to a paralyzing depression that has me as dark as the rain-soaked clouds outside. Maybe the rain has something to do with it. Maybe it was the suggestion of a friends plea on social media that SHE felt overwhelmed. Maybe it's just knowing that there are government employees working 9-5 to strip me of what few things I have in life. All of my loose ends are on a collision course with the aging process and THAT is not going to end well for me.

But mostly it's chewing on the loss of loved ones, the ever-growing hurt that never never stops. "Try to see it once my way" is a popular refrain in the songs of my youth and I have. I am all too aware of the rubble I made of my 20's and make no mistake it was my own choices and actions that created the mess. But does the past have to be a boat anchor tied to the feet of a swimmer? Is there no way to let go of it? Maybe not. Maybe her parents were right when they taught that one mistake is all it takes, that life is over if you fuck up once. At the time I rejected that argument but this delicate tightrope only seems to work if you stay up. Piranhas swarm the water below.

Maybe coffee and loud music will push these dark thoughts away. There's still a calendar full of amazement and wonder in front of me. And no matter how the cliff looms, well, there are a solid number of distractions on the path off of it.

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The Hitchhiker

In my memory it is a Spring day, maybe early April, and the windows are down in my old Datsun as I headed out of Eugene toward Seattle and a rendezvous with a beautiful redheaded Welsh girl who had stolen my heart. The highway was just picking up a groove and I was probably listening to Paul Collins' Beat or Gun Club when just outside of Coburg I blew past a forlorn figure hunched on the side of the highway. He was rolled up like a potato bug, arms wrapped defensively over his head. It couldn't be anything but a silent plea for help so I pulled over. The figure didn't move. I backed up on the shoulder and still no sign of life. I got right up to him and honked and he....uncoiled. Taller than I expected, lanky and dark dirt brown, he took long strides to come up to the passenger window where he ignored the door handle in favor of sticking his face and shoulders through the open window.

"So what do you think about the whole Jewish-German situation? I think that if the Vulcan Army could be brought to bear everything would work out alright, y'know? And Spock and Kirk, they'd be cool and I think maybe we could have everyone be friends again!"

I've never seen anyone else with really YELLOW eyes but his were a wild combination of jaundiced AND bloodshot. Six or seven days of stubble on his face and dried spit in the corners of his mouth. More out of reflex than anything else I said the first thing on my mind. "Where are you headed?" He hopped in and in a tone that was both eager and matter-of-fact said, "Dammasch. I'm going to Dammasch. It's a hospital and it's my friends' birthday and I'm going to see him for his birthday and it's at Dammasch." I didn't know exactly where Dammasch was but it didn't take much to convince me that the state hospital for the criminally insane was a good destination for him.

We drove north and he talked. Mostly it seemed that he had seen a lot of science fiction and had somehow blurred it with reality and Germany and conspiracies. He told me that he had escaped from a Nazi prison that was hidden in Eugene and that his girlfriend had been a Jewish spy and that he had killed her (!). He had stolen NoDoz from a 7-11 and had been running through the hops fields for three days while "they" searched for him with dogs and airplanes and spy rays and tractor beams. Chewing dry NoDoz and stealing food from farms along the way. He had to escape because he knew it was his friends birthday and he had to see his friend. He had a present for his friend, a present, you see, and it was for his friend who was in the hospital at Dammasch and he had to take him this present. THIS present! He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a wadded napkin that he had tried to keep damp. Unrolled with shaking hands the napkin yielded a tiny little pot plant. All of three inches long and with just a first trio of leaves he had been pouring water into his pocket to keep it alive until he could give it to his friend, his friend in Dammasch. Whew.

I stopped at a truckstop above Albany so we could get water. I thought about driving away and leaving him but thought it unfair to the truckers and that it would probably wind up in some kind of brutal stomping when he tried to peddle these stories to them. As we got toward Salem, though, I wondered if I would regret not leaving him as he began to tell me about his mental prowess. He was a warlock, you see, and could steer the car with his mind. There was a jumbled story of eternal life that could be achieved by cloning someone but to clone a person you had to cut out the roof of their mouth and that was something he offered to do right there in the car. He would drive the car with his mind and all I had to do was lower my bucket seat and he would cut out the roof of my mouth and clone me. Right now. Right here in the car. I was calculating how hard a kick it would take to break one of his ribs or maybe jar that passenger door loose and kick him straight out of the car at 65 miles per hour. Then he told me where he had learned about cloning.

For a long time, no one knows how long, for centuries, there has been a war between the Anti-Men and the Satellite People. The Anti-Men are tall and thin and gaunt and tend toward very rigid fashion codes that wouldn't be foreign to a leather bar or Berlin in 1938. The Satellite People are bigger than raccoons and have fur like cats but with monkey fingers and curiosity. They jump up on your bed at night and will touch your face while you sleep. They have long tails. The Satellite People live in a cloud that orbits the earth and watch everything that happens down below. They're probably related to the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz. And the Anti-Men hate them.

So on balmy summer nights, when the cloud dissipates and the stars twinkle in the warm clear sky, the Anti-Men will force orchestras onto flat bed railcars and ride across the open countryside. The orchestra plays and the Satellite People become more and more curious. The orchestra plays faster and faster and the Satellite People come down lower and lower to see what this amazing thing is, this orchestra on a train car, playing feverishly across the broad plains under starlight. And when the Satellite People reach a certain altitude, just close enough, giant spotlights mounted on the corners of the railcars are turned on and the Satellite People are stunned and drop from the sky like frozen lizards in Florida to be captured. And once captured they are cloned and turned into slaves of the Anti-Men, the roofs of their mouths cut out to create a race in chains. Enslaved forever.

And right about this point, and as he began to explain in great detail that his girlfriend had tried to enslave HIM and he had killed her in self-defense because she was working with the Anti-men....right about the point he began to get really insistent about the need to clone ME here in the car....here came the circular drive and sliding doors of Dammasch State Mental Hospital and I slid to a stop and he gathered up his damp napkin with the fledgling pot plant and crowed jubilantly that it was his friends birthday and he had a present a present a present for his friend and went loping gleefully, ecstatically, through those sliding doors and so passed from my trip and this story. Had it gone on any longer I suspect this would have a different ending but as it was I thought I had done a good deed by delivering him to this particular place and continued on my way to go see a beautiful girl in Seattle.

Now, you might think that such a thing would put me off hitch-hikers but in truth I took the new 205 cutoff around Portland and somewhere around the Estacada exit I saw a burly bearded biker-looking guy with a scrawled sign for Seattle. Thinking to myself that "nothing could possibly top that last guy", I pulled over and he limped up to the passenger side and heaved his bulk into the little bucket seat. Then took off his left leg and threw it in the back seat saying "that damned thing was about killing me! Say, buddy, do you know any Hells Angels? I'm a wanted man by the Angels and I'd just as soon avoid any of them so they don't do me in." And off we went to Seattle and perhaps the wildest night of my life but that's a whole 'nother story.

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The River Jordan

The most obvious question was whether she was the source of something holy. She was an enigma the first few times we met and I gnawed at the frustration over and over again. Drove past my exit having animated conversation with myself on possibilities. The one root truth I had to hold onto was that she exposed every shortcoming I had.

I tried to learn what resonated with her, where her eyes rolled back as if ridden by an unseen being. And recognized that there were places in her that I would never go -- things that were not just off limits but that were beyond my inclination. And somewhere in it, I found a key that proved to unlock our time together.

I just had to create an environment that gave her permission to escape herself. It put everything on the table and over the course of a few months we dove deep into an internal world of passion.

Moments like these never last long and trying to hold them more tightly only results in disappointment and hurt. We still see one another and I smile as she wiggles in to sit next to me and rest her head on my shoulder. She's a goofy and wonderful person and that smile between us will never fade.

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Mexico and a Beach

Monterey Bay at low tide releases hundreds of years of decay.  Fish eating other fish and pieces eaten by crabs and all of it mixing with oxygen to surrender their scent to the ocean breeze.

Driving north of Santa Cruz through pumpkin country on the coast road.  Another forgotten coastline though so close to The City as to be within lunch break distance.  As Portland labors under a winter storm flowers bloom here and young Mexican couples take selfies in the flowing yellow sea.  I was reminded of another coast road a thousand miles away, much further south and lost to the past, of winding turns and sparkling blue-green shallow bays.  Holly and Dana had been alternating between singing and snacking in the back seat of our 4WD while Edmund and I held down the beers and conversation up front.  As we rounded a bluff, a particularly fetching half moon of sand opened below us — a pickup truck with a huge camper shell the only inhabitant under a copse of palms at the south end and an empty campsite at the north end beckoning.  I hadn’t seen any kind of pullout or road but slowed a bit to scan the hillside.  “There” said Edmund, tracing a zigging line down the south end of the cliff.  On either side of the beach steep cliffs pushed into the water and fell at least 150’ into blue.  I kept an eye out for anything else but as we got to the southern curve there was a dirt pullout and a rough road leading off the edge of the cliff.  I kept some speed as I pulled off — these tight corners often produced a speeding bus or truck — and so hit the first drop at about 25mph, which was WAAAAY too fast.  The drop combined with a fast lefthand turn to hug the cliff face and we all lost contact with gravity for a moment before the SUV slammed back down.  I’m pretty sure I hit the ceiling twice and the noise of the cooking and camping cases loosely netted to the roof rack was deafening.  The girls began screaming.  I would have screamed, too, had I not been completely absorbed in the task at hand.  The “road” spun itself against the cliff at a remarkable angle and several immediate washouts had me trying to launch a tire off the last outcrop and up onto the even-steeper angle of the cliff to get us around them.  Braking was impossible — the loose dirt would slide us forward with no control.  So I gassed it and felt the drivers-side lift impossibly high.  I hoped the cargo net would hold — I hadn’t packed it for this and could imagine all our equipment strewn down the hillside for hundreds of yards.

Below the washouts, the road evened out slightly, seeming much more stable.  I managed to grind the brakes to a complete halt.  Something felt like a broken tooth at the end of the pedal.  My head hurt from contact with the ceiling.  The girls were still screaming.  I took a deep breath and turned in the seat.  “That is NOT helping.  If anybody wants to try the rest of this, I’ll get out right now.  No?  Then shut up.  If YOU want to get out, I’m fine with that, too.  But I think I see the way down from here.”  Edmund brushed beer off himself and took a long drink.  His slightly-tan English skin had gone back to a normal deathly white.  The girls gulped but quieted.  I took another deep breath.  Letting off the brake, I started picking my way down the remaining 100’ or so of vertical.  There were at least two weird sounds coming out of the truck but nothing was exploding and I felt like the first thing to do was get down.  At the pickup truck, two campers had emerged and were clutching each others arms and pointing in amazement.  There were a few sliding skidding stops but the rest of the path was less dramatic than the first 50’ and in 15 minutes we were parked under the palms at the north end of the beach.  The other campers walked up to join us.  They brought me a cold beer.  “Sorry we don’t have enough for everyone but we figured the driver could use it.”  Looking back at the cliff and tracing our path it looked totally improbable from below.  I wasn’t sure I could make it back UP and the remains of a VW Bug covered with cactus seemed to augur poorly.

“How, exactly, did you get a top-heavy pickup in here?” was the question on my mind.  They grinned.  Low tide.  Drive around the bluff on hard-packed sand and take an easy beach road out.

We stayed nearly a week.  Camping chairs thrown nipple deep in the warm shallows and tiny fish nibbling between our toes while we drank cold Corona and cooked over a beach fire.  At night the water was no less warm but gained luminescence and we marveled at the trails we left to mark our passages.

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Hi, I'm Clint. I'm 56 years old and have lived like a fucking pirate for about four decades, give or take some shenanigans in my tender years. Lived like? Fuck it, I'm a FEDERALLY REGISTERED PIRATE. Filled out the paperwork and everything. I was surprised to live past 30. I'll be surprised at anything past 60.

I'm an old fuck now. I go to bed earlier, break things less often, try to do right by the people I love. Some friends still tell me that more happens around me in an average week than they experience in a year or a lifetime. I have some normal friends. But I also have a lot of friends who are just plain astounding. They travel the world doing things that Huck Finn would recognize. They build shit and play stuff and are messy or terrifying. There's some good times around those people.

Lately I've been a photographer but it's just an elaborate therapy working out all my failed relationships. I think it's helped, at least as far as acceptance goes. I still write songs but I've torn up my arm enough that fretting a guitar is tough. It's a leftover from my 20's. I'll probably think in terms of lyrics until I die. I assume photography will be with me, too, but I suspect something else is brewing. Stay tuned. I'm gonna tell some stories.