Ten minutes on March 20, 2008
Ten minutes on March 20, 2008
I am staring at rooftops full in late afternoon sun but it is 11 in the morning. The rooftops are in sun and the housefronts all in shadow, and above the houses stand a regiment of pine trees, and above it all a square of cloudless azure sky. It’s a fine painting, very much like the ones I was showing to my literature class last week: Schuler, or even better, Hopper. Outside the sky is dotted with winter clouds, small, some looking like ideograms, kanjii, Rorschach images morphing out of parallel.
I’m in Grass Valley, at my current favorite cafe, Coffee Town (with a bookstore attached). Bob Dylan is singing
Early in the morning
Its early in the morning
Baby please come home
Baby please come home
I just don’t wanna be
So all alone
The harmonica work, the blues rhythm, contrast with the electronica they’ve been playing (Portishead, nice, Thievery Corporation, Air). I go up and ask – yup. iPod on mix.
Yesterday was wild, a sort of party with some moving thrown in. Steven Ford met me downtown, we drank a quick espresso and went to get the U-Haul, and it started to rain, as though Darcy was still around, and we were not going to ever ever move any of her stuff in dry weather. It reminds me: I ate breakfast today in front of Fox news at the hotel (“Fox News: fast and fair!”). The news: floods in the Midwest, in Missouri, rivers over banks, a woman driving back to save her pets trapped with her 65 year old mother, the pets all die, the humans are saved, no wait one pet survives.
Flood. Darcy Genevieve Sweeney. More and more you look like Kali.
The stories I heard last night got me (out of the flood of stories Steve told me, sitting at the base of a huge tall tree as I stood over him up in the truck, in one of the innumerable pauses in work). One: the neighbors who were interviewed by the cops said there were two shots. The first one into the ground, Steven thinks, to make sure the gun worked. The second into the head. She had two guns and one was a 25 mm, a wussy little gun that could kill you if you got infected from the bullet wound. The Beretta is meant to destroy. The evidence bag had a gun in it surrounded by parts of the head, bone shattered by the resonance like an earthquake in the skull, though the skin holds most of the head together afterwards.
As I write this the music is Miles, melancholy and cool, an everyone in here is reading, working quietly, even the espresso machine feels like the kind you’d install in a cathedral.
Steven gave her the gun because she felt more secure with it. I wonder. He shook his head and talked about the Army, tintinnitis, killing someone and watching guns do their work as a cop…Huntington Beach, the other “Surf City USA,” his first cop gig. The dark began to fall, the truck was now full of the last butt ends of the house’s material goods, some nice silverware, an authentic Irish tea service (I turned it over Steven asked no it isn’t is it? But it was, Made In China), some people show up to ask about renting the house and Steve takes them on the grand tour, the guy complaining all the time companiably about his motorhome and what a nuisance the damned thing is, the complaining of the living I think. Good natured grumping. He is in real estate; he tells us about houses selling for $100,000 in places that would go now for name large number here.
As we talked we talked about ghosts, haunting. It was funny and strange to every once in a while look up and say to Darcy or her ghost or our own memory of her still hovering, “Hey no offence babe but…” or “Why did you do it you brat?” or just “Hey if you are listening…”
The woods got dark like in a fairy tale and the house was now empty full of the nonmaterial things and we got in the pickup and went to Grass Valley and walked to the Owl and got a late meal a big guy meal steak duck potatoes some decent reds and I taped Steven but it wasn’t as powerful as the stuff we’d gone over before.
Neither of us was quite ready to go but he had to work at 430 am and I had to get into my hotel and so we said farewell and his headlights described an arc across the dark and moved up the empty road up and away into the mountains.
I am staring at rooftops full in late afternoon sun but it is 11 in the morning. The rooftops are in sun and the housefronts all in shadow, and above the houses stand a regiment of pine trees, and above it all a square of cloudless azure sky. It’s a fine painting, very much like the ones I was showing to my literature class last week: Schuler, or even better, Hopper. Outside the sky is dotted with winter clouds, small, some looking like ideograms, kanjii, Rorschach images morphing out of parallel.
I’m in Grass Valley, at my current favorite cafe, Coffee Town (with a bookstore attached). Bob Dylan is singing
Early in the morning
Its early in the morning
Baby please come home
Baby please come home
I just don’t wanna be
So all alone
The harmonica work, the blues rhythm, contrast with the electronica they’ve been playing (Portishead, nice, Thievery Corporation, Air). I go up and ask – yup. iPod on mix.
Yesterday was wild, a sort of party with some moving thrown in. Steven Ford met me downtown, we drank a quick espresso and went to get the U-Haul, and it started to rain, as though Darcy was still around, and we were not going to ever ever move any of her stuff in dry weather. It reminds me: I ate breakfast today in front of Fox news at the hotel (“Fox News: fast and fair!”). The news: floods in the Midwest, in Missouri, rivers over banks, a woman driving back to save her pets trapped with her 65 year old mother, the pets all die, the humans are saved, no wait one pet survives.
Flood. Darcy Genevieve Sweeney. More and more you look like Kali.
The stories I heard last night got me (out of the flood of stories Steve told me, sitting at the base of a huge tall tree as I stood over him up in the truck, in one of the innumerable pauses in work). One: the neighbors who were interviewed by the cops said there were two shots. The first one into the ground, Steven thinks, to make sure the gun worked. The second into the head. She had two guns and one was a 25 mm, a wussy little gun that could kill you if you got infected from the bullet wound. The Beretta is meant to destroy. The evidence bag had a gun in it surrounded by parts of the head, bone shattered by the resonance like an earthquake in the skull, though the skin holds most of the head together afterwards.
As I write this the music is Miles, melancholy and cool, an everyone in here is reading, working quietly, even the espresso machine feels like the kind you’d install in a cathedral.
Steven gave her the gun because she felt more secure with it. I wonder. He shook his head and talked about the Army, tintinnitis, killing someone and watching guns do their work as a cop…Huntington Beach, the other “Surf City USA,” his first cop gig. The dark began to fall, the truck was now full of the last butt ends of the house’s material goods, some nice silverware, an authentic Irish tea service (I turned it over Steven asked no it isn’t is it? But it was, Made In China), some people show up to ask about renting the house and Steve takes them on the grand tour, the guy complaining all the time companiably about his motorhome and what a nuisance the damned thing is, the complaining of the living I think. Good natured grumping. He is in real estate; he tells us about houses selling for $100,000 in places that would go now for name large number here.
As we talked we talked about ghosts, haunting. It was funny and strange to every once in a while look up and say to Darcy or her ghost or our own memory of her still hovering, “Hey no offence babe but…” or “Why did you do it you brat?” or just “Hey if you are listening…”
The woods got dark like in a fairy tale and the house was now empty full of the nonmaterial things and we got in the pickup and went to Grass Valley and walked to the Owl and got a late meal a big guy meal steak duck potatoes some decent reds and I taped Steven but it wasn’t as powerful as the stuff we’d gone over before.
Neither of us was quite ready to go but he had to work at 430 am and I had to get into my hotel and so we said farewell and his headlights described an arc across the dark and moved up the empty road up and away into the mountains.
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