Vonnegut, the Hofbräuhaus, and me.

The Hofbräuhaus beer will forever be in my mind.

The thing I admire about Vonnegut is the fact that he told it like he saw it. He didn't swathe his narrative with romantic dribble. He was entirely over the top all the time. He could be annoying in his pessimism, but there was always a hint that despite everything: his suicidal bent to kill himself like his mother, (except through cigarettes), and his distrust of everyone's intentions, he wanted wrongs to be righted, and sought to dissolve the pretentious myths and outright lies of the world with his acidic pen. 

I remember the first time I read Vonnegut. I hadn't gotten thirty pages into the book, and Vonnegut, in one of many asides, mentioned the size of the penis's of the men in the novel.  Why would anyone do this? Why was it relevant to the story? At first I thought Vonnegut was a pervert. He was prone to doing crude drawings in his novels to make his points. He drew assholes and other human anatomy to make his obtuse points. Don't get me wrong, I mostly like the writings of Vonnegut. He did what few writers of his time had done: telling the truth, and doing it in a droll way.  Some consider Vonnegut to be shallow, and sometimes he was, but when he was serious he was like a winter storm descending on Indianapolis. Some of his novels do nothing for me. I have my two favorites: Slaughterhouse Five, and Breakfast of Champions. 

I love the characters of Billy Pilgrim and Kilgore Trout. Plainly, they are Vonnegut's alter-ego. I bought the DVD of Slaughterhouse Five. I never tire of watching it. Vonnegut was at his best in this novel, and his most honest and vulnerable. WWII scarred him; as it scars soldiers now. But Vonnegut's scars were on the inside, and those are the hardest scars to heal. Slaughterhouse Five didn't come out until 1969. It took him twenty-five years to tell the story of his experience as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. Some memories are easier to leave in a bunker in Dresden than bring out into the light. Clearly Billy Pilgrim was Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five. I understood the idea of coming unstuck in time. I think Vonnegut sat at his typewriter one day and had flashbacks to his experience, and the story demanded to be told. It had to be told or Vonnegut would never be right.

I did not understand this concept exactly until 1973. I had gone to Germany to visit my brother in the town of Augsburg in Bavaria. I had never been overseas; I was fresh out of high school. Augsburg was a town with roots in the Middle Ages, full of Gothic style churches, a bastion of Catholicism. My brother was a teacher in a German high school, and fluent in German. His friends told me he had no American accent. He was married to a very bubbly woman from Oregon, who I liked very much. But my brother had baggage from the Vietnam war festering in his soul. I was not aware of this fact; people are excellent in hiding their true feelings. I first learned of my brother's problem when we went to Munich, to the

 Hofbräuhaus beer hall. This bastion of beer has been in existence since 1592, and is located at the intersection of Münz Bräuhaus and Orlando am Platzl Streets in downtown München.

I had never drank a heavy beer before, so my brother ordered a large stein of their famous dark brown beer. Not knowing any better, I finished the stein in under five minutes. With a dizzy gait and my brother egging me on, I went in search of adventure. My brother said I should go try to pick up a woman. I had never tried to pick up a woman before. The only women I had known were teenagers. In the Hofbräuhaus the women were thirty years old and up. After milling around for ten minutes I came to a section that had a wooden rail around it. The people on the other side of the rail were having a grand time. I waved to a woman who was easily forty years old. Before I lowered my arm I felt a sharp jab in my back. I turned and saw a short man, one of the two Hofbräuhaus guards, gesturing for me to move on. So I moved on, feeling stupid for drinking the beer and for waving at a random old woman. When I got back to the table I found a disturbing scene. My brother had a young man pinned to the table's bench, and was shouting obscenities at the young man, calling him a Viet Cong. A Viet Cong? The war had been over for several years. What was going on?

After a moment my brother let the man get up, and later, when we were leaving, he apologized to the man on the front steps of the Hofbräuhaus. Vonnegut would have understood what had happened, but I didn't at the time. I thought my brother had lost his mind. That was my first experience with what war does to human beings' minds and souls. My brother's marriage did not last, and it took twenty years for my brother to find himself again. He remarried and had two nice children, and his first wife moved to Arizona. So it goes.

I am going back to Germany in 2012, one way or another. I have unfinished business there. My mother's father took a diary from a dead German soldier on a battlefield in Belgium. It lay untranslated until 2006. I had the diary translated by a native of Germany, who taught German at a nearby university. The diary tells the story of a young man in love with a girl, an artist and musician, who was caught up in the pageantry of war, and leaves college to go to the front. Once he arrives he realizes the mistake he has made. The narrative ends a few months before the end of the war. It is not clear if the man died or he simply lost the diary. My brother owns the diary, and will not give it up. I had him make a copy of it however; I'm going to the town where this German came from, which is, ironically, west of Dresden,  and slightly southwest of Berlin.


There are things each person must do to set things right to make peace with the past. I believe I am doing the right thing. I am becoming unstuck in time. I have to go back to where it all happened, like Vonnegut, and resolve it. I don't know what I'll find when I get there, and this is the way all journeys begin. And I have a feeling if I told Vonnegut this story he would say something witty and poignant and maybe he would do a line drawing that showed a German WWI helmet with a dove sitting on it.

God bless you Billy Pilgrim. Say hi to the Tralfamadorians for me.

D3 and the Demented Drizzles.

This should be a Seattle folk-rock-pop Indie music-group, but alas, it is not. It is the state of deficiency amongst most of the people in not so sunny western Washington. Nutritionalists with big brains and enlarged thyroids have studied the winter doldrums of Washingtonians and concluded that most, if not all of them, need to supplement their D3 intake during the winter months. Otherwise, fairly normal people can become zombies. I have written of zombies before, so in order not to be redundant, allow me to elaborate.

Go into any Barnes & Noble or Powell's (in Portland), cigar shops, two-bit used book shops, and the second rate libraries of ordinary people, and you will likely find at least two to three zombie related novels. There are writers in small towns like Idaho Falls, or Peoria, or Muncie, or most of Orange County, who are cranking out volume after volume of this nonsense.

I have read that art imitates life. This means that if the world is slipping into moral turpitude you can read about it in cheap novels. I call them cheap because practically any lousy writer with tendencies to like necrophilia, or who are seriously morose and D3 deficient, can knock out these uninspiring wastes of electronic bits and reams of paper. We need novels of hope not ones which glorify the undead.

I pray that there is a weather and moral change afoot that will make the Northwest the New California, and America the beacon of hope it once was. It is about time the Northwestern folks had tans, and it is about time Americans cast off this darkness that threatens to engulf the entire world. Even ten minutes per day of sunlight would do the trick. We are not ice fishing caliber people, we are just people in need of love. Evil is like lichen in most ways. Stand too long in its company and it will take root in us.  Resist it and it will flee from you.

There was an evil wind today, that whipped the clouds and the expressions of human beings into a dull gray depression. The clouds hung their weary faces and wept a fine mist that slid under the upturned collars of darkly clad citizens in downtown Seattle and the outlying communities. The curved face of the Space Needle deflected the blasts of wind, and the needle prodded the low clouds until a steady rain fell. I was walking in it today, and the grayness was tangible. The wind grabbed hold of the lip of my cap and threatened to send it tumbling in the air onto the black oil stained street. But failing in that effort, it rushed up my pants legs and took hold of my leather coat with thin icy fingers until I held fast to the collar of my coat with one gloved hand. I searched the pale gray sky for signs of light but the light was on hiatus.

In the pocket of my leather jacket was  a Calvin Klein cologne card, heavily scented with five different colognes from my trip to Macy's and Nordstrom's yesterday. There is no greater affirmation of womanhood than to observe the goings on in the holy shrines of femininity within these stores. I took one step in their sacred rectangles and women gave me the evil eye and I stepped back. It was a sacred place created for women, and I had trespassed. Their looks drove me to the small bastions of manhood, where manly colognes stood in their artsy glass containers. I could not find the one I had used two years ago, whose name is "Gravity." This is because the world of fashion stops for no one and trendy scents that don't perform go away rather quickly. But I came away with three papers scented with colognes I liked. As I walked the uneven and broken sidewalk today I held one of the cards to my nose to remind myself of better days ahead. Manly days in perhaps one of the most difficult times in my lifetime.

The better days ahead will smell like the colognes because I will wear it. The sun will return, the days will get longer, the lovers will kiss on street corners, the homeless will smile with imperfect teeth at the change. Brace yourself for the cold winds of change ahead; it is a roll of the dice whether we will see 2013. Prepare yourself for the gray pallor that is sure to fall upon America and the world. Buy lots of D3 and multivitamins. Build a bomb shelter. Stock up on foods that will last. Buy a water purifier.

Pray.

Nut-jobs and Nebbishes in Nowheresville

I have met a few crazy people in Seattle.  Some are illusions of course. You can always spot the people who are only representations of human beings.  I keep an eye out for these types. I assume that some of them are angels, and perhaps some are extraterrestrials here to scout us out. And then there are the human beings who really are human beings but their brains are billions of light years away in another dimension. I know a guy like that. He told me the other day that he was standing at a bus stop in the rain and the nephew of Jimmy Hendrix gave him a pure silver serving spoon. The nephew said Hendrix had not meant to kill himself. So, I suppose that is why the nephew feels it is necessary now to go around Seattle with a wood case and give random silverware to strangers. It makes so much sense. I asked my crazy friend how he was certain it was Hendrix's nephew, and he said he knew because it is a small community, and  all the musicians know one another. He said he should know because he was a music producer. I asked him what studios he'd worked in or what musicians he had produced and he got irate and stormed away, saying that was all in the past, and besides, none of that mattered anymore. He also claims to be a film producer but he's not produced any films. He is trying to get me to edit a screenplay from a guy I've never met and if I ask him who is this guy and how my crazy friend knows him, he walks off and spews a litany of swearwords. He says there are little helpers sent from God and if I knew anything I'd know that. I guess I just fell off the turnip wagon; I didn't know God was in the business of using crazy people to witness to strangers with silver spoons. Who knew?

I have wondered why the universe delivers crazy people to me. It is as if I have an invisible neon sign above my head that only crazy people can see. The sign, in glowing blue letters, reads: Nut-jobs Welcome.

I used to jest that I was God's jester. I complained I hadn't even applied for the job; God decided that I was going to amuse the universe at large and so he made me a writer who writes whatever comes into my head, like a writing machine (in the parlance of Kurt Vonnegut).

One of things I wrote about today had to do with the nature of God. Most thinking people have done a fair amount of serious thinking about God. And because I am into profundity, today I wrote about the probable philosophy of lepers. In this imaginary leper colony, I described the lepers, who through no fault of their own, had contracted this horrible disfiguring disease. The lepers, seeing the God of the world outside the leper colony had forsaken them, had made up their own version of God. Their God was also a leper and losing his limbs. The leper God had no limbs at all and was mostly spirit, except for a large gap in his front teeth. The gap was actually a black hole, and when the lepers died they would be sucked into the black hole to reach Leper Heaven.

I came up with this interesting take on understanding God from a piece of paper I found under a table in the Portland airport a couple of days before Christmas. The paper was neatly folded, so I unfolded it and found a crude concentric line drawing, in blue pen, that was either done by a six-year-old or by an elderly brilliant physicist. From what I could discern, the drawing indicated that the world, as we know it, is made up of orbiting objects around a black hole. The hole is to be worshipped. Thus the leper colonies' religious slogan must naturally be, "Life Sucks!"

There are black holes everywhere in this economy. There is a phrase we often hear, "Whatever floats your boat." At the VA hospital in Seattle, there are a lot of leaky boats that have been scuttled. They will probably never float again. These veterans row into the hospital from all over the area. They know they are doomed to sink, and that their crazy ideas about life have been formed by years of homeless living, and drug and alcohol abuse.  They cannot do anything about their plight. They are also being used by God for the amusement of the universe. Out there they are laughing at us, we just can't hear them.

While I was waiting my turn at the hospital, an older man in a dark trench coat asked me how he might get out of the building, and get to his car. His glassy eyed stare reminded me of my father's Alzheimer's. I told the man I thought the way out was to go up one floor, and if he followed me I would help him get out of the building. We stepped into an elevator half filled with people. The elevator went down one floor before it went up. The man got out before I could stop him. "Bon voyage!" I said as he slipped away. Then I arrived in a room where all the crazy people were. I overheard a Vietnam veteran man named Wild Bill tell a thin older black man that he felt the country would be right as rain if doing random acts of kindness earned the doer a tax write-off. He had the black man stand and he gave the man a back rub. "There!" he said, "now if everyone did that to one another, we'd all be better off!" The feeble looking black man smiled and agreed. I am guessing the black man was God in disguise. God gets a lot of back rubs from unsuspecting masseuses.

It is hard to argue with a crazy person. I do not recommend it. I think we all could use a few more back rubs. I would vote for any politician who ran on a platform based on random acts of kindness and back rubs. Or, simply on a silver spoon giveaway methodology.

But I'm crazy that way.

Beating the Running Blues.

Yesterday was a good day. I was looking for the signs, and the signs were all showing green. Here's what I was looking for mostly: A Job.  I was a bloodhound on a trail, and my nose was pointing me due north five to ten miles, to the town of Bothell.

For readers not familiar with the town of Bothell, it is a typical looking small town connected like a caboose to Seattle, which lies thirty miles south as the crow flies, and let me tell you, there are a lot of crows in this neck of the woods. Bothell is not as hip as Seattle, but they have a Starbucks where the refugee hipsters hang out. Bothell is home to the tiny Cascadia campus of the University of Washington. When one arrives in Bothell it is best to pay attention, because you will pass through the town in under five minutes.

The real surprise, for me, is the Bothell Business Park. Let me tell you about the park. Imagine a clever California contractor jacking up a business park in Orange County and plopping it in the middle of a meadow surrounded by fir trees. That's Bothell Business Park. As I walked around the thirty or so perfect, uniform, clean, upbeat buildings I thought I was having a flashback to when I worked in Mira Mesa, CA. The buildings were doing it to me. And then I saw my destination - Brooks Sports. I had found Nirvana. Finding it was like the lotus opening; I was forced to confront not only my job search but an incident from my childhood. Let me explain.

I have always been an athlete. And when you possess athletic skills from the beginning of your life, you feel the pull of destiny to achieve something spectacular. You are driven. It is the competitive nature that makes an athlete strive for victory in all they do. When I was a boy I wanted to be a geologist, an astronaut, a pro baseball player, or to win an event in the Olympics. Essentially, I wanted my face on the front of a Wheaties box.

My legs were the first part of my body to grow when puberty set in. In the space of two years I shot up six inches. I had six inches of upper body and the rest was legs. I had restless leg syndrome; I had the urge to run, and my legs could take me there fast. I was Forest Gump.  Mr. Nellermoe, the eighth grade track coach noticed my legs and said, "I bet you could run pretty far on those long skinny legs of yours!" And then he said, "You know, boy, there's a school record for the 880 yard dash at this middle school, (this was before the metric system made it the 800 meters), and with those legs you might just break it."

"You mean, that I might break my legs?"

"NO, BOY - THE SCHOOL RECORD! I'M GONNA MAKE YOU A RUNNER!"

I had grown up with a father who was not aware of my existence, and attention from a male mentor was like manna from Heaven. So I replied, "Sure, why not?"

The middle school was poor and did not have a regular track. The track was made of grass, and grass wasn't always cut. It was inferior to cinder and the modern rubberized running tracks. I didn't know the difference. Nellermoe began training me like his personal slave. His training consisted of the following: A.) He held a stopwatch. B.) He said, "Run, Forest, RUN!"  And that was about it. He didn't teach me strategy; he simply wanted me to fulfill his goal to smash that record. The record was 2:21, set by a boy whose last name was White. To beat the record, all I had to do was run two moderately fast laps around a track, but as I mentioned, we had no track to speak of.

Nevertheless, I got faster, very fast. I ran so fast I sometimes tasted blood in my mouth. The dandelions were pummeled into dandelion soup. My lungs grew exponentially; my heart grew to the size of a cantaloupe. I learned, that is - I taught myself - to pace my breathing and my head to tell my body, "That's right - RELAX BOY - EASY DOES IT - save your strength for the sprint at the end." And my body obeyed.

We had one track meet on the calendar. It was against the city kids of our town. They had been training on a real track for years. But I had confidence, I had clocked a 2:30 880. If I hadn't stumbled on a rock I may have matched the school record. Nellermoe's face beamed as he clicked the stopwatch that day, "You almost broke the record! Next time, RUN HARDER - BOY!"

The day of the big meet came. I stood next to a short guy with wavy brown hair. I didn't know anything about this kid except his name: Bill Barney. My coach had not warned me about Barney.  The other runners didn't worry me, but I figured Barney might be good. When the starting gun fired we set off at a blistering pace. Barney and I left everyone in the cinder dust. We began lapping people on the first lap. We could have stopped for Frappuccino's and won that race. We cruised through the first lap at sixty-five seconds, and we didn't slow down. Around the bleachers we went on the second lap, running side by side in the shadows, stride for stride. I wanted to make small talk, maybe ask Barney what kind of bionics he had in him, but he was all business. He intended to run me into the ground. My legs were a blur, my lungs were saying, "When is this guy gonna fade?" I wanted to elbow that shrimp but former altar boys don't do things like that. Besides, I had a feeling it wouldn't have worked. He was playing head games with me and I had to test his resolve.

But Barney wasn't fading. At a hundred yards out I hit the jets. My after-burners were flaming. I figured I had enough rocket fuel to blow by Barney. I smiled, thinking of that shrimp writhing on the infield, holding his gut. I was wrong; Barney got faster too; he had more gears than a semi-truck headed over a pass. And then the unthinkable happened: about fifty yards or less from the finish line my legs gave out. The top part of me was pumping fine, saying, "We got this, we got this!" but my legs were gone. Barney cruised past me; I thought I was going to pass out, and then I hit the track. It was a cinder track and the cinders tore holes in my palms and legs. I could hear my heart beating like a drum, and the other runners coming, but I couldn't get up. Then I could get up but I didn't want to. So I lay there until everyone passed by.

Nellermoe said as I walked past him, my hands and legs bleeding, "You could have broken the record! Go get on the bus, BOY!"

That year we moved to a new house in an adjacent county. I left all my friends, and Mr. Nellermoe behind. At the new high school I met several horrible coaches who were every bit as bad or worse than Nellermoe. I might have tried to regain my glory but the fire wasn't there. I tried pole vaulting. I was good at it too, but the coach would not buy me and a guy named Lang the poles we needed, so I only vaulted eleven feet. I didn't get the confidence for running again until junior year, and I never went out for track again. I was still fast, and my legs were still long, so I went out for cross-country. I became the number two runner.

So when I saw the Brooks Sports office I had the craziest thought: What if I got back into running again? Would I still be as fast? What could I do NOW? I hadn't  been a slacker. I had taken up tennis, golf, bowling, cycling, and occasionally I still ran - mostly on trails in Eugene, Oregon, or on good running tracks. For a while I ran two miles every day. But then my mid-forties came and I cut down on running.

But like the saying goes, "It's never too late to try." I am not as fast as I once was, but I am in great shape. It may take me a year, but with the right shoes, training, and a good track - I'll find out. My goal: to run a 5k next year. I need a running partner like Barney. I wonder what he is up to now?

The vagaries of bus riding in Seattle after dark.

I took a bus ride into downtown the other day that brought me face to face with how close one can get to sleeping on the streets of a major city. I will describe that experience in a moment.

The first leg of my trip had auspicious beginnings; I took the express bus (number 522) to downtown with no problem. I enjoy riding the buses; I like to interact with people, and study their faces. It is a strange thought that it is unlikely that I will see any of these people again in my lifetime. They are living their lives that are as real as mine, but they seem like phantoms until I make eye contact and initiate conversations. And I often do.

I wasn't dressed appropriately to walk ten blocks up to Capital Hill. I don't recommend walking up hills in leather sandals, especially when the temperature is hovering around freezing.  I arrived at the Northwest Film Forum office on 12th Street ten minutes late. Twenty mostly twenty-something year olds were listening to Marty Oppenheimer, of Oppenheimer Cine Rentals, explain the workings of two 35mm motion picture camera's and a super-16 film camera. To buy the 35mm camera's would set you back anywhere from $100,000 to $250,000. The super-16 only cost $15,000.  Making films is not an inexpensive proposition. You can ruin your credit rating with one unsuccessful film, not to mention it might lead to your getting divorced and being pursued by your financial backers, and the I.R.S. Which is to say emphatically: filmmakers are the either the bravest people in the world, or the most foolish, or both.

Oppenheimer is in the business of renting film camera's to people who are not afraid of risking everything. He knows the ins and outs of every model, and he and his assistant showed how each was loaded. The eager young filmmakers gathered around him as he removed the film magazines, loaded them, and filmed us. The images were dark and this was  due to the fact that it was rather dark in the small theater, plus our breathes were probably fogging the lens, because we were packed like sardines.

While I was at this demonstration I met two people. One was a Cambodian-American man who was planning to shoot three documentaries in town. The other was a young man who grew up in Cambodia, France, and yet was born in Pittsburgh. After the presentation the three of us went to lunch at Phnom Penh, a Cambodian restaurant in the Asian part of downtown. The owner, Sam, had just released a book about his experiences during the Khmer Rouge years. A poster advertising the book was displayed on the front window of the restaurant.

Over lunch we talked, or mostly I should say we listened to this Cambodian-American, "Bobby" talk with intensity about the Khmer Rouge genocide and the injustice of the United States not to educate and provide for the refugees who flooded into America from Cambodia due to those horrible years that happened over thirty years ago. He said it was America's fault that a fair percentage of these Cambodian refugees ended up homeless, and incarcerated for criminal behavior. Bobby promised the young Frenchman, Timothy, who grew up in Phnom Penh and was leaving for Cambodia in two days, that he would show him how to run a camera, and that while Timothy was in Phnom Penh, he should:  A.) Recruit attractive Cambodian actresses to be in Bobby's films. B.) Find impressionist art, (he would wire Timothy the money for the art). C.) Get back as soon as possible so they could begin filming in Seattle. Uh-huh.

I was the odd man out, and I was also the only one with any experience to speak of in making films, and creating art, and writing scripts. None of this mattered to Bobby.

After lunch Bobby dropped me off in downtown. I had an inkling that our film alliance, our  triad, would go nowhere, despite Bobby's assurances that we would all be working together very soon. I suspected Bobby was a drug dealer, as he avoided answering my direct question about how he'd made his money, and his mentioning that pot should be legalized. I didn't doubt Bobby had some money, but I figured it smelled like pot. I have had dealings with typical Hollywood film people, who make all sorts of promises and don't fulfill any of them. After L.A. you get a sixth sense about things like this. It is like the old joke that goes, "Hello," he lied. Clearly, if a film was made, it would be Bobby's vision that led the way, not mine, and I wasn't sure I wanted any part of it. No, I was sure I wouldn't be.

The gray sky showed a rim of lavender. I was in downtown Seattle, and it was closing in on 4PM; it would be dark in an hour. I had the sudden insight that my bank had not attached the right pin number to my new bank card, but my naturally optimistic side pushed that dark thought to the back of my mind, because I didn't have one dollar in my wallet.

I arrived at my bank at 4:15 and discovered that the bank had closed early, so I stepped inside the glassed in ATM area and tried my card. It said I had a zero balance in my account. I tried three different pin numbers to no avail. That was when the panic crept in. I knew I had money, but there was no way I could get to it, and the sun was setting, and the vampires would soon be waking up. I always had a fear of vampires and darkness, and it was not looking good for me. I rubbed my neck, dreading the bite I felt was coming.

I went to to four stores to see if I could get cash back on purchases. The clerks were in no mood for my explanation; they had heard it a million times from other indigents.

As I walked block after block, wondering what I could do about my situation, I walked amongst throngs of seemingly successful, well coifed people doing their holiday shopping. I passed scores of homeless people begging on street corners, often with glassy eyes that showed they had lost their hope, or displayed their intoxication. I thought of myself and how close I was to sleeping on the street, and I said a prayer for help. I am a person who has empathy for people, and recalled my friend mentioning that when a person is homeless they become invisible. They cease to exist in the eyes of most of the world. But I knew if I used my brain I could find a way out of the situation. Or so I thought.

At a Walgreen's I phoned my brother for a ride. I didn't want to do that because it was an eighty-mile round trip for him. I phoned while a manager was considering my story. I was trying to get cash back on a purchase of a bottle of Fiji brand water. Then the man did something unexpected that I wish everyone in America would do more often: he opened his wallet and handed me three dollars. "Gosh," he said, "I'm sorry you've had a hard time of it today. Will this be enough to get you home?" he asked.

I felt a wave of tension sliding off me. "Yes," I replied, "Thank you!"

The Cambodian-American, "Bobby" was wrong about America. Americans have faults, yes, plenty of them - but one thing the United States has done more than any other nation: they have always given money to help people. And it works on a big scale, and it filters down to the little people who work ordinary jobs in American cities who give money to people in need - like me - this past weekend.

A Steve Jobs fairy tale.

There was a drought in the land, and the owner of the apple orchard was sad. His orchard seemed doomed. He said to his partner in the business, "I must go away for a while. If I don't return you may have my share. I can't bear to see the orchard die."  


The partner of the owner tended the orchard as best he could, and sometimes he made a profit but mostly the money just covered his expenses. Once, customers had come from miles around to buy the apples, but not now. Across the valley and to the north other orchardists were raising similar fruit, but their fruit had no flavor. But the apple imitations were cheaper, so customers went to them. 


In the Spring, when the apples of the previous year still lay rotting on the ground, the bare apple trees began budding and blossoms formed as they always did, but this year there were more blossoms, like in the former years. And then the gentle rains came, and the sun shone, and the blossoms fluttered like snowflakes on the warm wind. The partner and his wife and children danced between the trees and lit candles, and their breaths rose upwards to the miraculous bounty of apples that began growing at the end of every branch.


The former owner had died on his journey, and his soul went to a barren place where the sky was perpetually gray. There were no trees there, and the crops were cut low to the ground. Brittle, pale yellow stubs made dull whistling sounds in the perpetual cold, dry wind. The owner sat in the gaps between the rows and prayed for rain or sun, or anything that would change the monotony of his new existence. But this was not a place where prayers were answered quickly. One day was like the previous day, and there was no sleep. 


One day the old farmer lay with his face to the ground and felt a small something in the trouser of his overalls. He sat up and found an apple seed in the pocket, and his ghostly face widened into a smile. It had the same rich brown color it had had in the land of the living, and it glowed with life. He planted the seed in the fallow ground, and for moisture he used his own ghostly spit, and for sun he used the light of his own soul, and the seed grew into the most lovely apple tree he had ever seen. It budded and produced perfect apples. He gathered seeds from apples and used the same process to grow more apple trees. Ghost spirits came from everywhere to admire the orchard. In the gray land the bright apples were visible from far away and glowed against the grayness of the sky.


Seeing the old farmer's success, the Lord of All opened the clouds and a beam of sunlight pulled the old farmer heavenwards. The Lord let the old farmer travel back to the land of the living to see the wonder of his former orchard. For now, customers were coming to his former orchard in droves to buy his fruit, and paying his former partner and his family premium prices.


The ghostly former owner stood and smiled at the bins overflowing with apples. The bins were loaded onto the bed of the partner's truck, and when his partner got in the truck to drive to town, the former owner sat in the passenger seat. They drove the long straight dirt road to town, and as they drove the former owner noticed the smile on his partner's face. "You have done well," he said to his old partner. "This is a miraculous crop."


The partner sensed his former friend beside him and said, "Ah, if only you had stayed. If only you had stayed you would have been able to help me expand our crop. Now I must rely on other partners who were not with us in the beginning. It was so much better when it was just you and me."


The former owner said, "I will watch over this apple orchard, and the one on the other side. I changed things there, and I will help you change things here. As long as you remember me, I am always with you."


The End

Broken Ice on a Monday.

It was twenty-five degrees this morning in Seattle. The children and the commuters had broken the ice on the puddles and the shards lay on the rigid street like shattered glass. Too cold to be out walking, but I was out. The world woke at 6AM. I had eaten and even gone online by then. Every Monday is a new beginning, and whatever happened over the weekend is flung like broken ice and only the bare puddle remains. My bare puddle this week is muddled as most puddles are. When you are stuck in Limbo, it is best to not think about being stuck in Limbo. My Limbo is both real and imagined. The real one is the story, the Young Adult novel I crafted some time ago and sent to a publisher last week. I think of being a writer, a fiction writer, is not unlike being a batter. You get three strikes and then you're out. But what often happens is, you get hit by a pitch or walked, or you end up hitting foul balls for a long time. Every once in a while you connect with the ball, and get on base. I am still swinging, swinging, swinging, hitting foul balls. But I have a good feeling about my novel and my other novels too. And that is the trick in baseball and that is the trick in writing. It is the difference between batting .500 and being a strike out king. Luck is involved. Trust your gut. Believe. It is like believing in the truth of Christmas. Most baseball players, and I suspect - most writers, are superstitious. They have trouble with absolutes. Superstition is a natural process wherein you sense that there are other things going on outside your vision, powers afoot beyond your power to control. You sense, as you stare at your monitor, when you converse with strangers, when you walk the street early on a frosty morning with an mobile device wedged against your ear, or while riding buses watching the faces of those around you, and when you drive your car, and fly in an airplane - that this is an elaborately staged play with the director nowhere in sight. We all could be locked up for thinking these sobering thoughts, couldn't we? They have a word for it: paranoia. Welcome to the padded room; we hope you'll feel at home, sitting there in your straightjacket. Here's a thought: everything is both random, and predestined. These seem to be opposite ends of the sanity spectrum, but they aren't; it depends on your point of view. From God's point of view it is like a finely tuned machine, a clock with invisible gem driven gears that go all directions at once. Wheels within wheels. From our point of view it is folly, madness, random, and often cruel, like LOVE. And sometimes life is so ironic and funny that we burst into laughter at the profundity of it. We laugh at ourselves and our hopelessly ridiculous situation, and this is a healthy way to be. This is normal. Some call this coming to grips with what is and is not - Buddhism, or Judaism, or Christianity, or Hinduism. Some simply call it the Peace of God that, like a sheet settles down upon us and we close our eyes - and the world disappears - and all of this - our perception of time - is an illusion of what really is. We are but stardust and rapidly spinning universes of atoms. We are invisible except for the wonder of light. We are illusions, and as far as we know, we exist as part of a great ice sheet on a puddle, until God fractures our existence and we lay disillusioned like shards of ice on a rigid street on a winter's morning.

The aisles were mostly empty in the Prince of Peace Lutheran church on 145th last Sunday. I had walked there to meet God. God took the form of the elderly and the mentally challenged, who spoke out of turn once too often. One man behind me, who was of the latter, spoke loudly and above the voices "Your mercy is great!" Ah, now there was a testimony! Later on, I went to eat cookies and drink coffee with the church members, and found myself in a long conversation with an older woman named Monica. Her husband, Bill, wandered  away, and Monica told me about the complications of growing up with the Finnish language. She said the Finnish language is different from all other languages. While an English speaking person may describe a table perhaps in five different ways, a Finnish person could describe it in fifteen different ways. Language is strange that way.

Physicists and mathematicians say that there are at least eleven different dimensions, but probably an unlimited number. In some of them, we are as flat as slabs of ice on a puddle. They say that each of us has an exact replica of ourselves in each of these dimensions. Exact except that in these other dimensions the other versions of us are making different decisions than we are making. They may even be living longer or shorter lives as a result of their decisions. What are they saying, really? That we are splintered beings, that we feel detached and incomplete because our real selves are scattered across time and space? That would explain a lot. As if there aren't enough mysteries.

The Lutherans are not a lively folk. Ask Garrison Keillor. They don't generally talk about esoteric realities beyond this one. It is easy to be a Lutheran. To be a Lutheran you simply have to keep your eyes wide open and see only what is before you and that God is always nearby and will answer your prayers. Ah, if only life were that simple. If only it was enough to say, "Once upon a time a child was born in Bethlehem, and he was sent by the Almighty to save us from our sins." Ah, if only. If only Jesus had no doubts about himself and his mission. If only he had stuck with woodworking, with life as a carpenter. How much better to have dove tailed wooden joints to remember him by instead of a wooden cross. How much simpler our theology would be in the Western Hemisphere. How far fewer deaths would have occurred, how fewer wars fought in Jesus name there might have been. Ah, if only. If only Jesus had given the parable of the broken ice, then we would know what broken ice symbolizes. But we don't have that to lean on. And ice tends to break rather easily. Like faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is LOVE.

In the parking lot on the north side of the Prince of Peace Lutheran Church there is tent camp for the homeless. The church lets the homeless live there in their blue tarped sanctuary. They give them free dinners on Wednesday nights. I did not meet the homeless on Sunday, but if I did I might ask to join them. Jesus would, why not me? Listen: this is the fall of Western Civilization. The world is on the precipice of worst things, my friends. Go now; hand your sandwich to the first homeless person you meet. They will take it; they have lost their pride. The hand of the Lord of All has crushed them, but why? Careful now, hand the sandwich with observant eyes - it is the Lord you are handing the sandwich to. The least of these, the least of these. Yes. Watch and observe. Armaggedon is not far off.