Writing with the blinds closed and the door shut.

Where characters are born and die.

Writing is a lonely art, and every writer has their favorite sanctuary, and ritual, for productive writing. Some prefer being holed up in a hotel room, preferably during a snowstorm. Others need neutral views: office buildings, a slit of sky, a glade, the sea. J.K. Rowling prefers a private table in a café. I prefer writing in the wee hours, in bed, or at a desk, when it is quiet. I love libraries with private quiet rooms where no talking is allowed. I used to write a lot in the main library in downtown Eugene, Oregon. You simply had to sign up for one of their two private rooms. Each had everything I needed: a long wide table to spread out reference material, plenty of outlets, no telephones, a view of a row of books, and silence. I found that the library itself inspired me. I noted the conditions of the chairs, the patrons, the  weary and alert faces of the library staff. I noted the library was the haven of the homeless during inclement weather. I recorded my observation in my amusing and poignant novel, "The Frogs are the First to Go." In the novel, my protagonist, Fran Stefel, is on a journey of self-discovery, much as I was in the declining years of my marriage. She was undergoing metamorphosis akin to a certain frog species that once was commonplace in the Willamette Valley of Oregon (the Oregon Spotted Frog). Fran is led, by a voice in her head, to save the frog in her backyard pond, that herpetologists believed had gone extinct decades earlier. She believes the voice is due to a chip in her head, placed there at an early age by an advanced race of amphibians, the Vargoolians, who regularly abduct her to enlighten, probe, and instruct her. I have felt this way about my life many times, and I could not resist putting myself into the characters, and also from people I have met. I like tangents in writing. They call this style of writing "literary writing." I do not know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. It is simply the way I am and there is only a slight chance I will ever change, Probably slim to none, and never as much as the characters I create.  I wrote in my novel:

Listen; the Eugene Public Library in downtown is a sanctuary for the homeless.  Outside, standing on the front sidewalk, a hysterical teenage girl with meth sores on her face was screaming to no one in particular: “I just miscarried!”  Inside, on its three floors, homeless men and women sit in soft orange chairs.  Except for obvious things, like rolled sleeping bags, it isn’t easy to tell who is homeless.  Many of the homeless once had homes and careers.  Some had jobs as engineers and journalists.  The terrible economy, addictions, and bad choices brought them down.  Most are middle-aged; some are teenagers.  They are the lucky ones who can still walk and talk, but the things they say are frequently full of anger and frustration.  A few appear to be wearing clothing mostly composed of dirt.  When they fall asleep in the orange chairs they often snore and people from the library staff come and knock on the arms of those chairs and say things like, “You can’t sleep in here.  This is a library, people come here to read.”  The homeless know this of course, but they depend on human charity.  But charity in Eugene and most cities is in short supply, so the homeless have learned to hold paperbacks in their hands while they sleep to avoid being hassled.  This ruse works well because the library staff knows there are many books in the library that can put people to sleep.  The library’s janitorial staff copes with the problem by disinfecting the chairs each day.  But the smell never goes away entirely.  Nothing can be done about that because the smell is one of the most powerful pheromones on Earth.  It’s a unique scent, the odor of primal man, and smells like apple cider vinegar, mushrooms, fermented cotton, and damp earth.  It’s an organic scent: Mother Earth’s perfume.  Homeless men and women find each other in the night, like moths, with its help.  To the homeless the scent whispers: I am like you; I am lost, forgotten, and unloved.  It says, I won’t judge you.

I like to write in the hours before dawn because I am a morning person. Others are night owls. Sometimes, if I am really cooking, I write until noon and then I take a nap. I wrote most of one novel in a tiny bedroom that had no phone. The room isn't important; for most novels the room goes away once I get into the narrative. On one I was no longer in the room; I was on an undiscovered island in the Caribbean, on Santa Isabella Island, seeing the aqua blue and azure waters of its reef, the Spanish style buildings, the peculiar characters.  This phenomenon is not unusual. Teleportation is required to be a good writer. The fictional characters become as real as actual human beings. They do not age or die unless I say they do. They are immortal until I kill them. In a sequel, usually. Or the next chapter, or when I rewrite the book because it would be a better story if the character dies. Or kills someone. But I am not a big fan of murder. I did write a film noir where a duplicitous woman named Nora kills several people and tries to pin the murders on her ex-husband, Alden, who is a career postal worker with a penchant for making small films in his spare time.  She was the perfect femme fatale, and he was the perfect foil.  These people are out there, and I have met some of them. Writers, good writers, must get out into the real world. I have been a carpenter, commercial fisherman, ditch digger, newspaper reporter, artist, a sports nut, a culinary aficionado, a songwriter, a pole-vaulter, runner, an extra on a TV show, a husband, a mail processor, an advertising copywriter, an art director, a father, a liar, a good deed doer, a devout Christian, a lover, a film buff, a tango dancer, a rock hound, a cross-country driver, and a soldier. I have lived in Texas, Georgia, Washington, Oregon, Virginia, California, and London. And these experiences inevitably influence my stories. Where you live is where the story might gestate. Harper Lee's "To Kill A Mockingbird" had this sense of place. Her childhood friend and collaborator, Truman Capote, had a talent for making multidimensional characters, and the knack for good journalism, as evidenced in the novel, "In Cold Blood." In the title of his anthology, "Music for Chameleons," (1980), he sums up what writers are: chameleons. We blend in to get information. We are the flies on the wall.

My world record for the number of pages written in one day, stands at around twenty-one, and was set in July of 2011. I did what a writer should never do: I sent a query to a publisher with three chapters of an uncompleted novel. I didn't mention the novel was only three-quarters of the way done; it is a faux pas to submit without the manuscript being completed. Mea culpa. I just never figured the publisher would go for it. A year and a half had gone by and one day I received an email that read: "I love your novel! It has been occupying corners of several editor's offices for a year and a half. Can you please send the entire manuscript?" So I wrote back that I certainly could, but I had some things to do over the weekend and I'd get it to her on Monday morning. And then I went to work. The story and the characters were already in my head, and I had done a rough outline, but once I got into it I tossed out the outline and went with my gut about what would be a better story. And voila! I sent it on Monday, (80 pages longer than it had been the previous Friday).  Don't do that. EVER.

I do not know how writers who write novels with manuscripts over a thousand pages did it in the days before desktop computers. Like Michener, for example, or most of the Russian writers of note. Or Dickens, or Steinbeck. Most of the great ones. They did it the hard way: they earned it. But the constant thread, regardless of the advances of technology, is that all writers must venture out into the real world and mingle, and eavesdrop on real people's conversation to write authentically. Most people with even the smallest amount of writing talent can become writers if their lives are complicated and colorful. It has worked for Ernest Hemingway,  Sylvia Plath, Phillip K. Dick, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Laura Ingells Wilder, Sherman Alexie, and Hunter S. Thompson, and probably every writer in the history of the human race. The maxim I have heard often is "Write what you know." A boring life is not good compost for a bountiful harvest of stories. The caveat is that if a writer uses a thinly veiled retelling of their own life's experiences, they must be careful to avoid libelous narrative. Which makes the aforementioned authors especially good fibbers. The better a writer obfuscates  the less chance they'll be sued for libel. This autobiographical method is referred to as roman à clef. What do we know more than ourselves? We simply change a few names and the point of view and stretch the facts here and there and voila! it can be done. I once met a pretty thirty-something year old woman at a writers group, who was attempting to write a romance novel about a failed TV weather woman living in Salem, Oregon. She described the novel's details with enthusiasm. When she finished speaking I asked if any of the events had happened to her, and she replied, "All of it!" 


Birds have no teeth, and thus in order to digest their food they swallow pebbles. In the gizzards of birds, pebbles do the chewing. Eventually, the pebbles are polished and lose their effectiveness. Then they are regurgitated, or they pass out the other end of the birds. In this way, birds are like writers, and story ideas are like pebbles. Writers, whether they are writing fiction or nonfiction, are adept at swallowing these idea pebbles from their experiences in life. Writing is a grinding process that requires rough ideas. I have several folders dedicated to rough ideas. Most of the ideas  will never amount to anything. They are like mental calisthenics. Eventually they may end up in the trash. Sometimes they come back, like characters. I give them new names, new wardrobes, and new careers. A lovely take on this God-like control writers have was depicted in the film, "Stranger Than Fiction," (2006).  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7OIm2wz8iQ . This comedy-drama-fantasy film, directed by Marc Forster, and written by Zach Helm, stars Will Ferrell, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Queen Latifah, and Emma Thompson. It is essentially a romantic comedy with a twist. A famous chain-smoking author, Karen Eiffel, (Emma Thompson), is having a hard time finishing her latest novel. The publisher sends a representative named Penny, (Queen Latifah), to help her finish the novel. She is unsure if she should kill her protagonist, an IRS agent (and auditor) named Harold Crick. When she writes, “Little did he know that this simple, seemingly innocuous act would result in his imminent death," Crick, fearing he has schizophrenia, sees a psychiatrist, Jules Hilbert (Hoffmann), who realizes after a time that Crick's life is being narrated by Eiffel, one of his favorite authors. Crick's life does a one-eighty when he falls for Ana Pascal,(Glyllenhaal), the tax delinquent owner of a bakery. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MsmVJyHg0s&feature=related .  Similar to the novel by Kurt Vonnegut, "Breakfast of Champions," where Vonnegut, on his fiftieth birthday, decided to clear the junk in his head but assembling his other characters in one novel. Like "Stranger Than Fictiion," Vonnegut introduces himself to one of his characters, Kilgore Trout, a hack sci-fi writer.  In "Stranger Than Fiction," Eiffel realizes Crick is a real person and she cannot kill him. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdriF9RlwZU

I imagine this idea struck a chord with many writers, who have felt this wondrous power, this power to create people out of thin air, like God. I have, and I wouldn't want God's job to save my life. Good writing is like cooking. You must choose the best ingredient, in this case, the best word or phrase that is character with the tone of the work. I always have to ask myself, "Would this character say this or that, and how would they say it? What is their point of view?" The characters of a story live and breath just as we do, whether they are living on a distant world and breath with gills, or they live in the Midwest and are used car salesmen. But ultimately, they are people we have briefly met, known well, or heard of. They are ideally people we have spoken to, and ultimately, they are us.

The Scent of a Woman, Part III.

When it comes to their sense of smell, women are vastly superior to men.

The Nordstrom’s I peruse has a wide regal entrance. When you pass through it your senses are seduced by the women’s cosmetics area to your immediate left, where beautiful women are doing their best to make pretty and not so pretty women look prettier.  Being attractive is a very big thing for women, much more so than it is for men. Pregnancy, and childbearing wreaks large blows to a woman’s appearance, her self-esteem, and her resume. Which explains why the makers of strollers meant for running women, are doing so well. Looking good is moy importante to women. It can mean the difference between getting a promotion or not, as most women go back to work eventually. Men are clueless. This is why at Nordstom’s, Neiman Marcus, Macy’s, Ann Taylor, Abercrombie & Fitch, and other haute couture stores, and even the lower couture stores - you will find women’s cosmetics areas ten times larger than their men’s cologne areas. This is the way it is, and will always be: women simply have a more developed sense of smell than men. Sorry guys, it’s a scientific fact.

Scientists at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, collected micro-droplets of male and female human perspiration, and had men and women sniff the vials. The vials smelled equally odious to both men and women. Then the sweaty scientists mixed the perspiration samples with 32 different fragrances. The result: the men could only smell a nuance of perspiration in 19 of the mixtures. The women were able to smell 30. The study also showed that men’s body odors are harder to mask than women’s. Only a fifth of the fragrances could cover up the male perspiration odor. But why is a woman’s sense of smell so much better than a man’s? The structures of the noses of men and women are identical. It was found that women’s brains have a larger area devoted to the sense of smell. The answer? Monell’s study has shown it has to do with estrogen levels. Estrogen makes women more sensitive to scents. But again, it begs the question -why do women have a better sense of smell from a biological point of view? Why would that be important for the survival of the species? I'll get to that in a minute. First, lets' take a stroll around the tango.


Romance is a complicated love potion, and the Creator of the Universe is in the business of making love potions, so naturally it is well thought out. But the human side of the equation is like a love song that never ends. Scent is vital to the success of this marvelous plan. As a romantic, I imagine love stories evolving from shoes set side by side by sidewalks, a songbird, a cloud, a key, light skimming across an old desk, old photos of people found in an antique store trunk, the way a man looks at a woman and a woman looks at a man. For several years I have been a fan of tango. It is the most romantic of dances. To do the tango properly, the partners must make a connection. I had thought this meant they had to know one another before they began dancing, or they had to have been dance partners for a period of time, in love -preferably, to allow them to be in synch with each others movements. No, this is not the case. I learned this firsthand while in Perugino's coffee bar, on Willamette Street, in Eugene, Oregon, watching tango dancers glide past my table. Your heart would have to be made of stone not to be moved by watching two people connect while dancing the tango. Perugino's is a great hangout for coffee cognoscenti, and de rigeur for those whose romantic streak is as wide as the eiffel tower is tall. I sat many times beneath the self portrait by the master himself, that dominates the room, while under the influence of Perugino's coffee concoctions, nibbling Salade Niçoise, and while sipping excellent micro brews and wines. I gazed with lanquid eyes at the tango dancers, who sometimes spilled onto the street on balmy summer and fall evenings, when romance could not be contained within the narrow confines of the building. No show at the Uffizi Gallery could compete with skilled tango dancers, for pure artistry. Il divin pittore.


The best tango scene was in "Scent of  Woman" (1992) that starred Al Pacino, Gabrielle Anwar, and Chris O'Donnell.  Pacino plays the part of blind, bitter, retired Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade, a man bent on killing himself. Charlie Simms, (Chris O'Donnell) a student at an exclusive New England prep school, to pay for a flight home for Christmas, accepts a temporary job over the Thanksgiving weekend, helping Slade get his affairs in order. Slade takes Simms to New York, and they stay at the luxurious Waldorf Astoria Hotel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWNp3-r6SHw where Slade intends to end it all. Slade wants to go out with a bang, (literally), and manages to talk Simms into letting him drive a Ferrari. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itr0jcR0S4s Simms must tell him where to turn, or Slade will wreck the car. Over dinner, Slade informs Simms of his plan to "blow his brains out." While in the dining room, Slade sniffs out the scent of a young woman near them, (Anwar), and he and she dance a memorable tango while she is waiting the arrival of her fiancé.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBHhSVJ_S6A I often went to Perugino's on First Friday Art Walk, when the galleries opened their doors and people mingled and sipped wine while gazing at works of art. I watched tango dancers dance in the narrow space between the collection of tables and the bar. Mood Area 52, was often there, led by the singing and accordion playing of Michael Roderick, a Eugene teacher,  and several other talented musicians, including cellist Amy Danziger. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpppOOuCaVg I marveled at the couples who did not know one another, yet moved effortlessly to the tango music. I knew a man who taught milonga tango, and I tried my hand at it at the Tango Center in downtown for about a year. So when I think of romance, I think of tango, and when I think of tango I think of the film, "Scent of a Woman," and when I think of women, I think of their uncanny ability - their marvelous sense of smell. Romance is dead without the right scent, and God gave women the gift of sniffing out the right mate. God is pretty smart.

But back to the scientific side of the story of scent. The scent theory has to do with breeding. Yes – SEX – that sweaty three-letter word. The sweaty scientists at Monell have deduced that if a woman can smell sex hormones, due to her superhuman endowment of estrogen, and a man’s body odor is stronger than a woman’s, then there is a good chance a woman can “sample” the masculinity of men by sniffing them. It is a vestige of our primitive origins - our ape ancestry. It was especially important for survival; a woman needed a strong mate to father and protect she and her children. This also explains something I’ve heard women say from time to time regarding their intuition about gay men. I have known more than one woman who has remarked, “My gay-dar went off when I met him.” Now, this may not be the definitive test for detecting gay men, but perhaps it is rooted in biology. Men are men, whether they are gay or straight, but perhaps a few men have lower testosterone levels, and these are ones the women can “sniff” out. I read somewhere that women and men have tiny laboratories in specialized glands on the inside of their cheeks. These glands test for hormones. This comes in handy when men and women are kissing, which they have been doing since Year One. The glands of women test for testosterone, and the glands of men test for estrogen. I have a not so funny story to share about that, but I will refrain and get back to my trip to Nordstrom’s olfactory oasis.

 Okay, okay; I will tell all, you should be told. I have no secrets. I unknowingly once went out with a transgender man, on more than one date. The dates were all centered around learning to salsa and tango from a private teacher, in her studio in Eugene. Were there clues, olfactory clues, that he was a she, under $100,000 of surgical alteration? You betcha. But a man gets lonely. If I'd had the sense of smell a woman does it never would have happened. He, um, she, was a geology professor at a university. There is no sense in beating me up about it; I have done that to myself already. Now I just laugh about it. The relationship was doomed from the start; my sexual needle points to the far right side of the heterosexual spectrum. It was like that children’s story: Little Red Riding Hood, where the little lady says to the wolf, “My, what big eyes you have,” except in this case it was his/her big hands. A man’s hands are simply bigger than most women’s hands. Big hands means being able to throw big spears and big rocks. It comes in handy to be a man with big hands. John Wayne’s hands made his pistols look like cartoon guns. When John Wayne held a woman in his “hands” she looked like a bug. You get the idea. So this he/she professor had big hands. Those big hands allowed the professor, one night after our learning to tango and salsa at a private studio (taught by an ‘oh so sexy’ blond woman who my olfactory sense of smell told me was a woman through and through), to backhand a ping-pong ball like no woman I’d met. 

I guess that is when the lights went on in my head. They sure hadn’t gone off in my head much up until then. No, I am lying again. They did go off, I just didn’t want to acknowledge the three alarm fire bells going off. I had smelled the guy’s perspiration when we were dancing. He may have had his guy’s down there reconfigured, and he may have had fake breasts put in, and he may have had all the hair electrocuted off his body, but they couldn’t eradicate his sweat glands, (or his big hands, or his prostate). So that is my firsthand sweat story. Okay, I’ll admit the rest of it. Yes, I kissed him/her goodnight one time. Once was more than enough. If I didn’t have a three-alarm fire going on inside my heart when I was putting the big hand thing with the sweat thing, I certainly had once going off when I kissed this dude. I am a charitable man: I can overlook a few things. But this guy/girl could not kiss to save his doctorate degree. In geological terms, his lips were as slippery as slate on a hillside, or a Eocene magma flow, as wet and weird as crude oil bubbling up from the bottom of the sea. I pulled back immediately: my glands were reporting a full-tilt gayness in this fellow/lady. After our fifth date, after the ping-pong at my place, we had our little talk. He/she was in tears; I was wondering if I was the dumbest, most olfactory challenged man in North America. He said, “You wouldn’t have known the difference if we’d made love.” I replied, “No, sir, er. . .madam, you are greatly mistaken. I know the difference between a pouch and a you-know-what. Besides, I’m not some floozy you can tango with a few times and expect to hop into bed with.” Then I grabbed a tissue from my black sparkly purse and sobbed uncontrollably. “Why,” I would say, “you’re nothing but a cad, and, er, a guy, too.” He said, his/her eyes brimming with tears, “You don’t know what it’s like to father two children while being trapped in a man’s body, when you know you’re a woman on the inside!” 

“Sweetheart,” I said, in my best imitation of Humphrey Bogart, “I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but from where I’m sitting I could never look at you and have the word ‘woman’ ever show up in my vocabulary.” And so our brief love affair ended. My relationship with the professor of geology was on the rocks indefinitely. I wanted igneous, he wanted sedimentary, and never the twain would meet, not in one brief geological age. Now when I meet a woman I like, the first time I sense she wants me to ask her out, (based on my crude and inadequate and flawed scent abilities), I ask her if she was born with ovaries. If the answer is “Yes!” then we go to Square Two. So far I have only been slapped twice.

In both Nordstrom’s and Macy’s, which are directly opposite one another, in the mall I frequent, there are glasses containing narrow fragrance test strips made of white paper. There are also glasses containing coffee beans to clear your "palette" as you sniff different fragrances. Perfumes and colognes aren’t cheap; it’s nice to have an idea of what the fragrance smells like before you shell out $50 to $200. I have read that people tend to gravitate to the scent that most closely resembles their own natural scent. Had I had a woman with me I could have found it in five minutes, but as it was I had to sniff a lot of test strips. And here are the top ten men’s cologne fragrances, in the order of my preferences. 

1.) Hugo Boss “Night” (the dark bottle). Sultry, mysterious, perfect for all night gambling in Monaco or Las Vegas. 2.) John Varvatos., (the dark ‘night’ bottle). Exotic, refreshing, sexy; like an Alpha Romeo Spider Veloce on a curvy narrow Spanish highway, with a vivacious blonde speaking love in Spanish, Italian, and French, and with fluent body language. 3.) “Acqua di Gio” by Giorgio Armani. A fresh and pleasant scent, reminiscent of an Italian fashion shoot in the Tuscany region, perhaps at Mussellini’s summer palace, overlooking the fair city of Florence. (Look, isn’t that the ‘David’ sculpture down there? OMG!) 4.) “Guilty Intense” by Gucci. Pure seduction in the piazza, with time in the confessional optional. 5.) “La Nuit de L’Homme” by Yves Saint Laurent. A reliable lady-killer, to be used at midnight in Paris. 6.) “L’Homme Libre” by Yves Saint Laurent. Dangerous, but not lethal. 7.) “Pour homme” by Bulgari. A sensuous fusion of a retired, but still potent - bullfighter, with the ambiance of  a confident, handsome waiter at the restaurant of a five star hotel that your girlfriend fell in love with as he took her order for escargot simmered in a good French wine, shallot, garlic, and butter bisque.  8.) “Pour Monsieur” by Chanel. Not to be used within two kilometers of any convent in the South of France. Considered a concealed weapon in most of the wine growing regions of France.  9.) “Terre D’Hermes” by Hermes of Paris. Like the kiss of an orange heiress aboard a white shiny yacht anchored off the Côte d'Azur. 10.) “Havanna” by Aramis. Wear this and you will believe you are a tango dancer from Cuba with an insatiable need for love with Fidel’s granddaughter.

And now we pause this rather torrid blog for a plethora of romantic banter, to set the tone for Valentine’s Day, which as any cologne-sniffer can tell you, is right around the perfumed corner.  I wrote this to my hypothetical Valentine only yesterday:

“Baby, you are my Valentine, my soul mate. When you wade into the waters, the warm, seductive, sunset tinted lagoon, where pink rose petals are strewn, the waters of love, where many have waded before you - you must make a decision, and the decision is crucial: You must decide to keep walking out until you can no longer feel the bottom with your feet. You must be willing to tread water until your love, your true love, comes for you. I will pull you into my dusty rose colored boat, and you will lie in the bow, in the curve of my embrace - the warm sun drying your hair and clothes, and your skin aching for my love with beads of water still clinging to it. My kisses will buoy you - when you look in my eyes you will see the times ahead, and the times behind, your unborn children, and your grandchildren's children. You will see us in a kitchen making a crepe on a summer morning. You will see us opening gifts and sharing the company of your family on Christmas Day. You will feel my love when I am far from you; you will feel it on the warm summer wind as you look at the moon, while lying on the silk sheets of our rose petal strewn bed, the warm breeze gently stroking your cheeks, and pushing aside the translucent curtains of the open French doors. You will be lovesick, and rise, and stand on the ornate stone paved balcony to watch for my arrival, your arms around your shoulders, and your arms will be like my arms and you will smell my scent in the night as you close your eyes. And in the fall, and in the winter, as you lie by the flickering embers of your fire, by the hearth of your fireplace, when the snowflakes fall gently upon our balcony, I will push open the doors of our love chamber, and there in the flickering fire's light we will kiss softly, slowly, and passionately until our love burns brighter than any flame ever could. And our rings will catch the light and sparkle like a million stars. This is the proof of my love: that I will lay down my life for you – of this you can be sure. My  word is my bond, and your thoughts are knit to mine. When you are with me at last, there by the fire in the cold Spring when love seems as new as the tender new blossoms of the roses in your garden, we will finish each other's sentences, and when I am near you, you will delight in my sultry and mysterious scent. You will say, “Baby, wherever did you find that cologne? It is exactly the kind I picture you wearing.” And I will answer: "Why, at the mall, my love, where men's colognes are fifty percent off."

Best of luck to you, you lovers, and wanna-be lovers. Be safe, do a lot of sniffing before you leap into the arms of love.

My future life: Retired and happy in Mango Land.

Retirement; the word evokes so much happiness, but for many people - whose fortunes have gone south during this economic meltdown - it is just a pipe dream. They have had to put off their retirements indefinitely. Of course, some lucky people dropped off the map a long time ago, their early retirements the result of winning the lottery, an inheritance, cashing in their stocks of Apple and Microsoft, their horde of gold, or it was simply their state of mind. Or maybe they did it the right way, the normal way - spending 20 or 30 years with one employer. Most of us had our chance to invest wisely, and find a job we could love or tolerate until we retired. Some of us did, and some of us didn't, and now we're heading into the home stretch in a time when Social Security is on the ropes, and world economies are dropping like flies into a Greek salad. So maybe we ought to get used to the idea of not retiring. Maybe retiring is a bad idea.

I never wanted to be rich; I just wanted to be happy, when I grew up. But as any investment counselor would tell you, the two are forever joined at the hips. I have a theory about my life and it may apply to your life too. I believe that each of us has a destiny to fulfill. Some destiny's are lesser than others. The theory goes like this: In our lives we may take a few extra roads to get to our destiny, but like Martin Luther King said, "I believe that we, (as a people), will get there...." It may cost you ten extra years of your life, but there is a place you were destined to arrive, and I don't mean 'death.' This is why people are so enamored with crime: crime usually pays. But rarely can the average moral person take shortcuts by using crime as the vehicle to riches, and not be thrown in prison, such as in the film "Raising Arizona." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBVesAXZPzA This explains why many have simply thrown up their hands and walked away from their mortgages. Hippies had the right idea: drop out. Most of them dropped back in a few years later. It is hard to scratch out a financial future while living in an old tie-dyed school bus.

One of my favorite Indie films, "Off the Map," addresses this dilemma. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0332285/ This offbeat comedy/drama, set in New Mexico, tells the story of the Groden family, who have dropped out of society and find themselves confronted by the more regimented outside world. Bo Groden (Valentina d'Angelis) is the 11-year-old daughter of a deeply depressed father, Charley (Sam Elliott), and a quasi-hippie mother, Arlene (Joan Allen). Arlene holds the household together, feeding them with vegetables she grows in her garden, (which she often tends in the nude). Bo, meanwhile, satisfies her sweet tooth by writing companies claiming to have had problems with their products, which usually results in a box of free samples. A letter arrives informing the Groden’s that they are about to be audited by the I.R.S.  The I.R.S. agent, when he arrives, wants to know why the family hasn't paid income tax for several years. His interaction with the Groden’s convinces him to quit his job and to pursue being a landscape painter. Bo Groden, in an attempt to cheer up her father (Charley), uses a new credit card she has managed to obtain by feigning to be an adult, buys her father a used sailboat for his birthday. Arlene is livid, but Charley is elated, and he begins to pull out of his depression. His newfound happiness ignites Charley’s and Arlene’s love for one another. The I.R.S. agent paints marvelous works of art. At the height of his talents, after a year of nonstop painting, he dies in the desert, leaving the works for the Groden’s to market. The Groden’s take the paintings to a prominent gallery and sell them for a huge sum of money, thus freeing them to continue life “Off the Map” indefinitely.

In the winter of 1968, my grandfather suddenly passed away from a heart attack. My father, quick to see his mother could not manage their acreage by herself, decided to speed up our planned relocation to the small town of Mosier, (population 284), located in Wasco County, about five miles from the town of Hood River, where we had lived the previous sixteen years. From 1967 to 1969 my father had occasionally taken my brothers and I to Mosier to work on our future house. It was haven to hornets, frogs, lime deposits in the plumbing, and a pervasive dust that settled on everything. This was our own "Off the Map" experience. We were four miles out of town, up a long dusty hill bordered by cherry orchards. My father had a plan that involved working the land for a decade or so, and retiring by selling off parcels of the land to whoever would pay the most money. He did not share this plan with us, and thus when it happened we, in hindsight, mourned the loss of the property that had been in our family since the early 1930s. My siblings and I were mostly disgruntled by the move to the town of Mosier. I lost my friendships with the kids I'd known  in Hood River, and was forced to form new ones in The Dalles, a town that was known to us as 'The Dulls,' known for its heavily chlorinated water, and perpetual shroud of sulfur scented air. The odious fumes poured nonstop from smokestacks of Harvey's  Aluminum, a large factory near the Columbia River, where aluminum was smelted night and day. The factory employed most of the male population over age eighteen, who had abandoned higher aspirations for their lives.

My father retired when he was sixty years old. My mother had quit her job at the telephone company a few years earlier. My father sold his auto-body business, Jack's Body Shop, to a coworker. The shop was located on the heights in Hood River, which is a flat area above the downtown. By that time Hood River was undergoing its own metamorphosis, as wind surfers had come en masse, and dubbed it a mecca for their sport, owing to the relentless wind that sweeps down the gorge year round. Old homes in downtown were being bought up and painted in a myriad of carnival colors reminiscent of Haight-Ashbury, in San Francisco, in the 1960s.  Meanwhile, my siblings and I had moved on to various places throughout Oregon and California. I was living in San Francisco when my parents began selling off the land. My father first sold two parcels of land, of twenty acres each, to people he knew in Hood River. He sold the last and largest parcel, about a hundred twenty acres, in 1990, to a fruit grower based out of California. The majority of the land had not been developed in over fifty years. There were stands of two hundred feet tall ponderosa pine on the hillsides, and mature oak. In the flat near the base of Hope Mountain, where my grandparents once grew bumper crops of strawberries, was a lovely creek, called Mosier Creek, that ran from the Cascade Mountains. My siblings and I had fished and swum in the creek on many occasions. Adios, Mother Nature.

The first thing the new fruit company owner did was ravage the land. He brought in Mexican workers to cut the big trees, plow the virgin ground, and plant row after row of cherry trees on the hillsides. He expanded the large ponds my father had bulldozed out of the hill, to capture runoff from the hillside. It was very sad. Now the property is dotted with cherry trees, and pesticides are being used on a regular basis. The runoff from the pesticides makes its way into the water table and ends up in the creek. I know my father wasn't thinking of us or the land when he executed his plan. The land was worth over a million dollars, and my father sold it for $300,000.

This is why one of my goals is to own land again. I relate to the the film "Off the Map." It is the way most people should live. If you get the chance to own your own land, you should grab the opportunity. On my future land I'm going to raise organic fruits and vegetables. And when I die I'll be sure people I love get a piece of it.

I do not know if retirement is all it is made out to be. I was walking on the snow covered sidewalk in my neighborhood two days ago and I had to walk around an older gentleman who was walking rather slowly. I noted he was about sixty years of age, and well dressed for the weather, in a long wool coat, and durable boots. I struck up a conversation regarding his preparedness, and he mentioned that he was retired, and not in any hurry to get anywhere. I said it must be nice to be retired, and he replied that mostly he was bored and didn't know what to do with his time. That wouldn't be the case with me. I would always be busy doing some project. When I go, maybe I'll be holding a paint brush in one hand, or I'll have my head resting on a manuscript I just printed out. Or maybe I will have just taken a bite of ripe mango that I am painting a still life of, the morning sunlight coming in my studio windows, glinting off its colorful skin.

Retirement is a long ways off, but maybe I won't retire. Maybe I'll just keep on keeping on until I die. I want to die with a smile on my face. That's the best retirement there is: dying happy.

Aloha kakou and mahalo all you coffee drinkers! Hawaii calls!

I designed this potato chip bag in 2005. Is it just a coincidence?

I know a woman in Oregon who has extended the offer of my accompanying her on her next coffee buying trip to Hawaii. She has a bustling coffee stand and catering business, with clients such as Intel. By coincidence, I'd recently sent her a link to the Kauai Coffee Company http://www.kauaicoffee.com/ which led to our conversation about the trip. She has toured the Kauai Coffee Company before and bought product from them. I suggested she might form an alliance that would require her to go to Kauai more frequently, and hinted I would enjoy being her company's consultant, for a decade or two. I gave her my best sales pitch. I believe I swayed her with my turns of phrases; she spoke to me via phone and said that if I promised I'd wear a grass skirt and the coconuts she'd see what she could do. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_Lq4rAJ1rQ&feature=related

The Kauai Coffee Company has been growing coffee since 1987, when they made the transition from being the McBryde Sugar Company. That company had been in business since the early 1800s, and had been one of the first sugar cane growers in Hawaii. The transformation was not without setbacks. In 1992, Hurrican Iniki wreaked $8.5 million dollars in damages to their coffee crop. They bounced back from that devastating loss, and by 1996 Kauai Coffee's harvest exceeded the volume of coffee produced in the entire Kona region. I imagine after that harvest they had a big barbecue and surfing party on a nearby beach.

While I have yet to go to Hawaii, my love affair with Hawaii has been going on for a number of years. One of my brothers was married to a gal from Hawaii for over twenty years. He told tales of the ideal climate, and the prospects of his owning a chunk of land in Kauai, due to his marriage. But there can often be trouble in paradise, and it took the form of my brother abandoning his Hawaiian retirement plans for a new wife and new children. Ah well, so it goes. It was he who first introduced me to the writings of James Michener, whose wonderful novels included Hawaii, and Tales of the South Pacific.  Michener's novel Hawaii, was perhaps the true beginning of my fascination with the Aloha State. Hawaii had everything I desired: mangoes, hula dancers, grass huts, hammocks slung between palms, crystal clear ocean - perfect for snorkeling or diving, a laid back lifestyle, and good weather. You can therefore imagine my elation when this business owner spoke of her love of all things tropical, in a deliriously happy tone, "Aloha! Let's go work in paradise!"
Of course nothing every will happen. But all is forgiven; Hawaii simply made her get carried away. I don't expect this businesswoman or anyone else to shell out the money for me to fly to Hawaii.

The harvest ended at the Kauai Coffee coffee plantation in early December. On their website you can learn about the process. I am sure my sister-in-law, the one married to my younger brother, would love to tour Kauai Coffee's operation. She has managed a Starbucks in the Seattle area for fifteen years. Her love affair with coffee began in Louisiana, where she was born. Coffee was the way her parents were able to get moving in the wee hours to operate their chicken business. Coffee has many benefits on morning challenged human beings, but like all stimulants, more caffeine is required to elicit the same effects. (aka: the jolt effect). Without caffeine, many offices around the world would be staffed by zombies, and nothing would get done until sometime after ten in the morning. American industry wouldn't stand for that. It explains why Intel would be grateful for my friend's coffee business. They even said she could park her enormous trailer there free of charge. It's just good business. And, the coffee my friend brews is every bit as good as Starbuck's (ten words in their title's) coffee drinks. Though coffee does rob the body of calcium, regardless of who makes it. And I have to tell you, I was grossed out by this businesswoman's suggestion I try a coffee enema. No thank you, if I drink coffee it's only going down one direction. Yecch!

In 2005 I was contracted to design a potato chip bag for Tim's Chips (Birds Eye Foods), via my former employers at Epic Ad Group in Eugene, Oregon. It was, ironically, to depict a Hawaiian Luau Barbecue. I immediately thought of a conch blower as the main aspect of the illustration. He and the other people shown would be in traditional Hawaiian clothing, (leis would be mandatory), which is to say - in clothes suited for life on a tropical island. I suggested the bag be bright orange. The barbecue scene would have a border of plumeria blossoms, and would essentially be a reflection of my own desire to live there. The Creative Director on the project had roots in Hawaii, and he was elated with my design. I went a bit overboard and made the hula dancer's bust a bit too big, so I had to do a breast reduction, but that was easy with a bit of acrylic paint and a small brush stroke. The result was a new addition to the brand that was soon in every grocery and convenience store I frequented. I proudly told random strangers, as I thrust the bag in their faces, that I'd designed the bag and done the illustration. They often smiled in a polite way as if to say, "Oh, you mean you think I just fell off the turnip truck?"

When I think of Hawaii, I can't get the image of Don Ho and Hawaii Five-O out of my head. I sometimes put Don Ho as the lead actor in that series. I also think of Israel Kamakawiwo'ole (aka: "IZ") http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZqPLxCDLs4&feature=related and his rendition of "Over the Rainbow." The Germans were especially crazy about this song, (it was Number One on their pop charts for over two months), perhaps owing to their love affair with the South Pacific. If you have been to Germany, and experienced their rainy, gray weather, you can understand why they have this affection for IZ. They need the D3 Hawaii offers in abundance. I bought IZ's album immediately - drawn to its happy tone that struck a chord in my soul. IZ died, like his father, of a massive heart attack. He was 38 years old. Both he and his father were also massively overweight. IZ, in one of his songs relates that his father died of a "broken heart." The broken heart part has to do with the perception that the old Hawaiian culture is being lost.

The Hawaiian gods are not yet forgotten, but many Native Hawaiians have amnesia about them. The Hawaiian language has not died, but the average Hawaiian is more adept at the popular pigeon English. Native Hawaiians have been replaced by Japanese and Anglo populations. Honolulu is like a tropical Los Angeles, with all the accompanying problems, such as smog, urban sprawl, and drugs in the schools. It is a portrait of the effects of a non-Hawaiian culture on an indigenous culture.  The non-Hawaiian diet that was foisted upon Native Hawaiians, like Big Mac's, French fries, Diet Cola, iceberg lettuce, chocolate shakes, and prescription drugs, has led to obesity and diabetes.  Once, taro, breadfruit, yams, seafood, fruits, and medicinal herbs were on the menu. Once, Native Hawaiians were trim and athletic looking. Aloha to that time. The Christian god replaced the Hawaiian's pagan gods of the land, sky, and sea. It was a familiar methodology missionaries, conquistadors, and crusaders had employed for quite some time, to the detriment of native populations.

Merchant ships from China and other ports of call had landed in Hawaii for at least two hundred years before Captain Cook arrived in Hawaii in January of 1778. Cook had previously sailed just about everywhere there was to sail, even exploring the coast of the Pacific Northwest, and Australia, in his ship - the Discovery. His first landing was in Kauai. He met the King of Maui, and spent six weeks exploring the islands. Then he set off again, looking for what was called "the Northwest Passage." A year later, in January of 1779, Cook and the Discovery landed on the Big Island, at Kealakekua Bay. The natives, who had mistaken Cook, upon his first arrival, for their god, Lono, a fertility and music god the first time they'd met him, were confused by his second arrival. Their prophesy did not say that Lono would return a second time. Shortly thereafter, a dispute erupted with the Hawaiians over the theft of a British dingy (the Hawaiians were seeking to strip the metal from the boat). Cook, in an effort to coerce the native to return the dingy, held their king hostage, which infuriated the Hawaiians. (Incidentally, the mistaken identity aspect of the story bears a remarkable resemblance to the tale of Montezuma mistaking Cortez as the returning  Quetzalcoatl, their feathered serpent god who promised to return, and had sailed away on a raft across the Atlantic ocean). Second comings would also be a theme of later missionaries, who promised the Hawaiian islanders that Jesus would return one day. But back to the story: during the altercation, Cook was slightly wounded, and when it was seen that he could bleed, it was further confirmation of Cook not being Lono. The Hawaiians promptly killed him and dismembered his body. (It did not help that Cook could not play the ukulele to save his life.) From the Hawaiians point of view, Cook was one more houle invader. Months later a peace was made, and the Hawaiians returned Cook's remains, which, by that time, amounted to a bag of bones, and a few shreds of Cook's naval uniform. So it goes.

King Kamehameha, (aka: "The Great") had united the Hawaiian islands at about the time of Cook's second arrival, in 1789. The islands had been dominated for a thousand years by invaders from Tahiti. The Tahitians were warlike and had easily taken over the islands. When King Kamehameha took command, the population of the Hawaiian islands were around 500,000 people. However, the population would soon decline dramatically due to STD's, and diseases spread by the visitations of merchant ships from the rest of the world. The Hawaiians had no resistance to diseases such as Smallpox, and the population plummeted much as the Native American populations plummeted due to contact with the outside world. King Kamahameha saw the writing on the palm tree, so to speak, and adopted the English's trappings for monarchy, as if he were ruling as the English under the rule of St. James (robes, bucklers, crowns, royal carriages, and caviar). He saw it was better to make peace than fight the invaders. A musket or a steel knife was superior to a spear or obsidian knife in most ways. The system of rule of the Hawaiian Islands was based on kapu, and involved the chiefs and the commoners. The people could own nothing, not even a good surfboard, and were under the rules of kapu and the chiefs were under the rules of the alii. King Kamehameha was living the high life. For a while anyway. He encouraged the young Hawaiian men to work as sailors on the merchant ships, and learn about the outside world. Many Hawaiians sailed in these boats to the Northwest and were referred to as "The Blue Men," and proved to be invaluable in their new roles as the white man's unofficial slaves.

Hawaii is the only U.S. state that was once a kingdom with its own monarchy. The Iolani Palace was completed in 1882, during the reign of David Kalakaua, the last king of Hawaii. The last royal to live there was Kalakaua's sister Queen Liliuokanlani, who abdicated in 1895, after the overthrow of the monarchy by the United States. Three years later, in 1898, Hawaii was annexed by the United States. In August of 1959 Hawaii became the 50th U.S. State.

The 18th and 19th century's white landlords of Hawaii set about putting in crops that were not grown in the islands, such as sugar cane. Sugar cane grew very well in the islands, just as it had in other colonies, like Jamaica, where slaves made the plantation owners very wealthy.  The first coffee plantations began with a Spanish advisor to King Kamehameha, Don Francsisco de Paula y Marin, who planted coffee  and pineapple plants on the Big Island in about 1813. Mango trees arrived in 1824. In 1828, the first coffee plant was built in Kona. With the latest craze for coffee, the cultivation of coffee beans is one of the leading crops. And there are many health benefits to drinking coffee. The old wife's tale, that coffee will stunt your growth or put hair on your chest are erroneous. It will not give you more sex appeal. But as any coffee drinker will affirm, it does help develop one's social skills in the workplace. You will not find more social people than around a Starbucks, which explains why women in particular are such big time coffee devotees. Women are much more social than men; talking is their domain, and coffee is the lubrication. Besides the energy boost and the ensuing heart palpitations, coffee provides  a number of health benefits. According to the Mayo Clinic, who also have documented its ill effects, consumption of coffee can help protect people from Parkinson's disease,  type 2 diabetes, and liver cancer, as well as produce depression lowering effects. Yes, it will stain your teeth, and if you drink too much at one time it can turn you into Alvin the Chipmunk. And yes, if you drink it black without the milk products and sugar it will help you keep trim and energetic, and with those additives, (like whip cream and a danish to go) it can make you retain fat. But overall, it is a healthy drink that should be consumed once a day, forever and ever, even if you do lose some bone density. Better to lose it in Hawaii. Besides you float more easy without all that bone to hold you down.

There are Starbucks on nearly every block in Seattle. You will never be without coffee if you come here. Billions of people drink coffee every day of the year. My sister-in-law gave me several bags of Starbucks coffee for Christmas. I am stocked up until this coming June. And by then I hope to be wearing that grass skirt and the, um. . .coconuts.

So aloha, people. If you want to learn a bit of Hawaiian before you go, visit here: http://www.mauimapp.com/moolelo/hwnexprns.htm

The birds are descending on the Bodega Bay of my mind.

The crows are gathering. It is like a reenactment of the film "The Birds."

Weather in the Northwest is wet, and rarely do we get much snow except at higher elevations. Rain is the norm, and lots of it. The weather forecasters are now saying the snow flurries that have inundated Seattle this past week will soon give way to rain showers. It's a good thing, the crows gathering in my neighborhood have recently begun looking at me as if I were their next meal. The crows, and the seagulls, swoop over shoppers in the parking lot of the Fred Meyer grocery store near me. They took a loaf of Wonder Bread, and a bottle of Jim Beam whiskey, from an elderly lady, and carried off a shopping cart laden with bird seed and Campbell's soup. They sit around smoking cigarettes, perched on the monkey bars at the elementary school, like Black Ops soldiers with time on their hands. One crow doesn't intimidate me but two-hundred of them leering at me with beady black eyes gives me the willies. It looked like a conspiracy of crows. I had flashbacks to the feature film, "The Birds," (1963 - directed by Alfred Hitchcock). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hplpQt424Ls&feature=related

I was expecting to see crows as I ran yesterday for the first time in several weeks. Snow had prevented most cars from ascending the hills and children, freed from school, were having the time of their lives. The crows could have descended en masse, but maybe they were busy in the Fred Meyer parking lot, pecking a shopper until they got a box of Cheerios out of the shopper's bleeding hands. Sleds were everywhere, zipping down virgin hills. It was a snow day bacchanalia. Teenagers were skiing; the chair lifts were out but the rates were as low as they'll ever be. So I was running, feeling good, feeling young, feeling my way on the crunchy hard packed snow that lined the streets. The snow was fresh; it had not lost its purity. There is a beauty to snow when it first arrives. It purifies things, and the oozing wet carpet of brown leaves that many people refuse to remove from the sidewalks in front of their houses, is subjugated beneath the pure white beauty that fell from Heaven in the night. But then the dirty snow develops. Slush-a-rama sets in; the city wakes, the studded tires of cars churn the snow until it is a gravelly black hued brine. Then the cold comes in the night, and the slush becomes a black milieu that trips up naïve morning walkers, and scorns the playful afternoon antics of innocent children. That is the snow people hate.

My brother told me he spun out the other day. He drives a big Ford pickup that weighs as much as a full grown elephant. He was coming home from Seattle on the snow fringed I-5 Highway, which was jam packed as usual despite the conditions. He had switched off his four-wheel drive, probably thinking of his flight to Washington D.C. the following day, to attend a VA come-one-come-all event. When he took the exit that would lead him to his home in a rural area community north of Seattle, he forgot to engage the four-wheel drive. The left turn sent his truck spinning like Kristi Yamaguchi doing a triple Lutz in front of Russian judges. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KplWMCsgx2Q There were no cars coming from either direction, which is proof that God continues to watch out for my brother. I remind him of that often: that he has the favor of God. I compare him to King David who was far less pure as the driven snow. God blesses all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons we are never privy to. Like Tanya Harding, for example. Every dog has his/her day. Tanya's probable involvement in trying to injure Nancy Kerrigan's leg in 1994, with a metal pipe wielded by either her ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, or one of his buddies, is forever etched in the minds of ice skating fans. In the ensuing years, Harding has been arrested for assaults while under the influence of alcohol. Drunker than a skunk on ice skates. My sympathy goes out to the truck; she has wrecked it so many times the police have lost count. Dealerships should be phoning her to give endorsements to their truck lines. But even truck dealerships steer clear of her. Harding claims to have been abducted by various masked men on multiple occasions. Essentially, Tanya went from being only the second woman to do a triple axel, to being the only woman to claim she was abducted more than three times by masked men who often forced her to smash her truck into trees or other hard surfaces. She is a second rate carnival act now. It is sad, the girl could leap ten feet in the air, on ice. I saw her on a celebrity boxing competition a few years ago. She wailed on the competition; she has a lot more practice beating up boyfriends than they do.

The cream always rises to the top. It may take a while, but in the end I think this saying is true. I look at myself this way; you really don't have much of a choice to think otherwise if you are to succeed at whatever you are doing. I remind myself of other writers and even politicians who succeeded when they seemed destined for anonymity. Like Abraham Lincoln, or example. He failed at being a soldier, and went from being a captain when he started to a private when he finished. He failed in business of law. Failed in being elected the legislature, failed to be elected senator, and vice-president. He wrote to a friend, "I am the most miserable man living. If what I feel were distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the Earth."

Failure is endemic to the human condition. We fail, there is no getting around it. We fail intellectually, spiritually, and physically; it is part of being human. It is not our failures that ruin us, it is our reluctance to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and try again. I know something about this. I can recite a long history of personal failure. By the grace of God I am still breathing, and where there is a breath of life there is a breath of hope. I owe my optimism and perseverance to my parents, who instilled in me a sense of integrity and right and wrong at an early age. Here is wisdom: It isn't what the world does to you, it is how you respond to your situation, and also summed up in the adage, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going." It is relevant that this was spoken by Joseph P. Kennedy, the savvy Irish patriarch of the Kennedy clan, and father of President John F. Kennedy, United States Attorney General and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, naval officer Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., Special Olympics co-founder Eunice Kennedy Shriver, and former U.S. Ambassador to Ireland, Jean Kennedy Smith. That's a heady group of winners. The Kennedy sons, in particular, sought to change things, to right the wrong, and three of them paid the price. Edward, "Teddy" was wise not to run for the presidency. Had he run and sought to lead America in the right direction, he would have joined his brothers at Arlington National Cemetery. I was in elementary school when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. My teacher, who was as stoic a person as I've met, had tears in her eyes when she delivered the news that our beloved president had died. In the subsequent years there have been many theories and suspicions put forth about a conspiracy regarding Kennedy's assassination, as well as tell-all tales about John Kennedy's sexual hijinks. There were also numerous conspiracy documentaries about the coup d'état. Kevin Costner starred in a film about it: JFK.  Check it out. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbUF8qE8zWA

The question about who pulls the strings in the world has always been of interest to me. I didn't want to know that behind the facades of government, corporations with military contracts, and Black Ops were running the show. But that's how it is, apparently. Little people like me can skirt under the radar and blog their opinions without danger. All we can do is live our lives with as much integrity as possible. Eat our meals with humility, go to our average jobs, pay our taxes and mortgages, fall in love, raise our children, paint pretty pictures, and say "I love you" to as many people as possible. God will sort out the rest. But keep an eye on the crows. When we are long gone, the crows will still be hanging around, laughing at humanity's failed attempt to survive, with their friends, the cockroaches, and the rats. And maybe Tanya Harding.

California Dreamin' is becoming a reality.

California will always be a magical land where new things happen.

The saying, "All that glitters is not gold," is apropos when describing California. It was the gold rush of 1848 that made it boom, and in these latter days, it is the lack of gold that is causing many Californians to rush to adjacent states, abandoning their mortgages and California's economic meltdown. I lived in California for many years, when its golden aura had not yet faded, when Californians were mostly happy and the San Andreas fault had yet to strand motorists on the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. Most of that time was the hiatus of years between Ronald Reagan's stint as governor and his being catapulted into the Oval Office. I have fond recollections of California, and a few that still make the hair on my neck stand up. There was the time in 1982 that I was at a large round table in a lounge in Hollywood, about to be hired to do the animated title sequence of the film, "Jimmy the Kid" (Gary Coleman, Ruth Gordon, Don Adams, Cleavon Little -1982). The executive director said, "What's it gonna cost me to hire you?" I started to reply and he waved his hand and said, "Nah, nah, don't tell me. Write it on a napkin." My buddy, Barry,  who had helped me land the job, smiled at me over his piña colada. It was an inside job. Barry had abandoned his Christianity for a time, and dove into the gay lifestyle. One of his liaisons had led to the job. It was the way things got done in tinsel town. Thirty years later, my hindsight is 20-20 of California. Like many, I have been keelhauled by this economy. But Californians know more about that than me. My California experience made me an avocado and guacamole aficionado. Mangoes would not be my favorite fruit, and my tennis game would not be what it is today, if not for the years I lived there. So I am thankful for my time ensconced in the Hotel California. It was mostly awesome. 


California is known for its stereotypes, and over the top success stories. It's Disneyland, smog, Silicon Valley, the birthplace of traffic jams, a place where hucksters hang out, a place where fruits and nuts aren't just agricultural products, coolness, un-coolness, roller skaters on Venice Boulevard, surfers, surfer chicks, preachers in glass temples, surfer preachers, blond bombshells, movies that bomb, movie stars transformed into governors and presidents, bronze stars and hand prints set into the pavement outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre, and http://www.chinesetheatres.com/  The Beach Boys, Academy Awards, The Doors, New Wave, the birthplace of the Yo Yo, beat poets, hippies in Golden Gate Park, big time producers, small time nobody's, home to Apple Computers, motorcycle gangs, Sunset Blvd., James Dean, The Grateful Dead, and every sitcom you watched on TV when you were growing up. Everything, man. It is a microcosm of America. And though I have a love of history, many much better, hipper historians have written much better volumes about both modern and the old history of California than I ever could. California's many fine universities and pubic libraries overflow with these histories. I would like to tell the story of the founding of Santa Barbara or San Francisco, two cities I lived in for several years, and my most favorite cities in California, but I am not qualified to do that. I would like to explain how the early settlers came from dark dreary towns in eastern Prussia and tilled the dark untilled ground and planted palms, orange groves, grapevines, and describe in detail the thousands of wind generators, and offshore oil drilling platforms that decorate California. I would like to share how its  early visionaries made tennis and volley ball courts, fish taco stands, and made flip flops the “costume de rigueur” in California coastal towns, and write extensively about the marvelous and colorful film stars who made and still make California their home. I think of Momma Cass singing "California Dreamin.' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-aK6JnyFmk&feature=related 


But a blog is not the Encyclopedia Britannica. I don’t have space or time to go into the very deep history and lore of California today. I can't stop to tell you about Momma Cass choking on a sandwich. I will not mention that I think that Adele looks and sings like Momma Cass. Hotel California is a mind bending place. You will never be the same after California. There are volumes of stories to tell of California. I will say that there is no doubt in my mind, despite the bottoming out of the real estate market in California, there are still many wonderful cities and people to be found in the Golden State. But if you only have a day to kill, see the California redwood groves, they are worth the trip. Avoid the other tourist destinations in California, if you disdain long lines and being  stalled in traffic for hours.

I last went to California in 2009 with my son. We camped near the redwood groves in the Lady Bird Johnson reserve of Northern California. It was awesome. We drove from Eugene, Oregon, where I lived for over twenty years. I also drove to California in 2007 to see my cousin, David, who sold real estate there for many years. David could sell anyone just about anything, and would if given half a chance. David has left California now, or so the rumors have it, having run off with a failed actress in her RV, to Florida, where they sell bottled water. They claim the water can do things to you that Mother Nature never thought of, like make you grow younger, for example. Or a better actor.

When I last saw David, and his pretty, but over the hill actress girlfriend, they were living in Bel Air. Bel Air is just a hop and a skip away from Beverly Hills, and if you drive a few miles further down the coast you’ll run into Santa Monica and Venice Beach, which are perhaps the coolest places to hang out in the L.A. area. In other words, Bel Air is ideally situated on some pretty high-end real estate property. I registered several of my screenplays at the WGAw office when I was in L.A, and that was pretty cool. I also attended an actor's workshop near Hollywood and Vine. It was run by a former Canadian wrestling star, Rock Riddle, (never mind he didn't know anything about acting in films per se). This is a typical scenario in California - where everyone is vying for the American dollar, cashing in on people's hopes and dreams. It started during the Gold Rush and it has never stopped.

Most of the real estate in Bel Air, and Beverly Hills, isn’t worth the millions they ask for it, that is a given. You couldn’t grow grain crops on the land unless your mules could walk upside down on the terrain, and most mules cannot do this, even in the olden days of early California. Californians are an ambitious, rather materialistic folk. In Beverly Hills, even the gardeners make six figure incomes. We should remember that Californians have given us a disproportionately large number of the new and hip trends and products. Want to be trendy? Go live in California. I regret Californians not labeling their trendy inventions with stamps on their undersides that read: “Dude, like, we totally thought of this first gnarly idea in California. Whoa.”

My cousin David and I drove to San Felipe, Baja (Mexico) when I was there. The border guard thought David looked like a gray haired Mexican. David thinks he still looks like a cross between Richard Gere and Tom Sellick. David mumbled a strange assemblage of Spanish to the guard and the guard screwed up his face and asked David and I in clearly articulated English, “Do either of you two dudes speak Spanish?” I said, “Je ne parle pas espagnol. Mon cousin, David, pense qu'il peut vous vendre le pont de Brooklyn.” (I do not speak Spanish. But my cousin, David, thinks he can sell you the Brooklyn Bridge.)

San Felipe is a sleepy fishing village on the northern tip of the Sea of Cortes. The climate there is dry but not too dry. Hemingway loved the Sea of Cortes. It inspired him to write the novel, “Old Man and the Sea.” Near the old sleepy village lay a development David was involved with. He has made some decent money in real estate and it enabled him to buy an airplane, which he put together himself and was repairing in a rented space at a small airport. Real estate was on David’s mind, and that was why we had driven nearly  three hundred miles to San Felipe. He owned a piece of ground at an American owned development that I forget the name of now. Let us call it Rancho San Felipe. David owned a property on the 18^th fairway of the golf course of Rancho San Felipe. They have patented a grass on the course that is unique. It is greenish brown in color, and tolerant of seawater. So they water it with water pumped from the Sea of Cortes. David's property was about the size of a living room in a ranch style house in Cucamonga. He wanted $250,000 for it. Nobody was biting and David was running out of cash and credit cards. We had arrived in time for a weekend sale-a-thon at Rancho San Felipe. Potential buyers had driven down from L.A. and San Diego for the event. Many were nervous about shelling out a quarter of a million dollars in Mexico, where you can normally buy villa’s with twenty bedrooms for that price. But in Rancho San Felipe you could buy a reasonable replica of everyman’s idea of what a Spanish villa looked like for the same price but with eighteen fewer bedrooms. 

I accompanied David on one tour of a house, with a young nervous couple from Orange County. The houses were so new that the plaster was still wet. They looked rather nice until you looked closer. For example, I tapped on what looked to be a solid plastered column and heard an echo you would normally hear in the Grand Canyon. They were made of ticky-tacky imported from villages all over Baja and Southern California. The development is set on a slope that according to David, has an aquifer that runs under the ground from a nearby mountain range. David said the mountains were laden with enormous deposits of gold and silver that the Spaniards, not to mention millions of impoverished Mexicans, had failed to find. From one of the faux villa’s you can see a wide expanse of the Sea of Cortes. It is a romantic view as long as you don’t look down at your yard, which is not in yet, and will never be because of an ordinance that only allows Ocatillo, palmetto’s and cactus.

The weekend was nice. I played tennis, and walked on the beach. I found about ten pounds of pretty little shells. David could not sell his 18^th hole property, or the house to the nervous potential buyers he toured through the ticky-tacky house.

But let me shift gears here and share the info I found today about Whittier, an average town in California. Some of the information was too boring to entertain you, so I have embellished the details as I thought necessary. I have never been to to the town of Whittier, and that is perfect for this illustration, because I have not been to many towns in California that have been swallowed up by the urban sprawl of L.A. The town of Whittier, CA has Mexican roots, as do most Californian cities. Some of the roots go all the way to Mexico City. Mexicans believe the roots go under the city into the Aztec ruins. But that is another story. California was owned by Spain for two hundred years. Before that it was owned by God. God liked it well enough, but he had other fish to fry, and he had noticed it had a large rift in the Earth's crust anyway, so he said, "You can have it."

In 1784 Manuel Nieto, a retired captain who served in the Portola Expedition, was granted 300,000 plus acres of land by the King of Spain. The land grant, in what is now California, stretched from the hills north of Whittier to the sea, and from the Santa Ana River to the San Gabriel River. Eventually Mexico severed ties to Spain, and later they were beaten by the United States and relinquished California.

For a while, the town only had one taco stand, a few idle chickens, and an old woman named Chimichanga, or Lola for short. She was toothless, but she could make tortillas like nobody's business. Imagine her shock when a bunch of Quakers showed up who had 100 pounds of Quaker Instant Oatmeal in their Conestoga wagons. The few Mexicans came out of their adobe houses and squinted their eyes at the white folks. "Ay," they were heard to remark, "More gringo's!" The Quakers came out from the east coast - they had bought the land sight unseen. Many of them were also blind. They used white canes to survey the land. There was a bunch of tapping going on, which naturally was the foundation for the distinct sound of The Beach Boys, but this would be years later. Soon, the former Mexicans, whose eyesight was like 15-15, were having the blind white  Quakers plant corn, chili peppers, medicinal marijuana, peyote, and jicama. The Mexicans were crazy about jicama. And peyote. The Quakers knew nothing about peyote and jicama, but they were peaceful folk and though they only spoke German and pigeon English, the two groups got along swimmingly. Sometimes they went for swims; the former Mexicans wearing next to nothing and the Quakers wearing all their clothes.

The biggest Quaker landowner, Jacob Gerkins, who had bought the land in 1868 for $238, from the U.S. Government, could not grow a normal beard. His grew perfectly fine on the sides of his face and along the bottom of his chin, but he couldn't grow a mustache to save his life. The other Quakers, and some of the women too, admired him so much they too took up his unusual beard style. The former Mexicans, who were now Californians, (Mexifornians), became barbers to help the Quakers look more homogenous. Later these Mexifornians started gangs of barbers who carried razors. Thus, the gangs of east L.A. were born. First they were clean cut, and then they only liked to cut. Later they set up respectable businesses with low awnings because people were shorter back then. They also later made their cars lower to the ground because, well, time had passed but they were still short of stature. 

The town's name comes from a Quaker named John Greenleaf Whittier, who was a real person, but he never saw the land. He was blinded by love back east – smitten as it were. He was a famous poet, writer, and newspaper editor. He wrote many fun and curious writings. His most famous was, "One Flew Over the Cucamonga Tree." It is now lost to history, as is whatever fame he had. He only wrote one poem in his life anyone can remember, which was written to dedicate the town he never saw, which we can assume was read at a ceremony in downtown. 

The poem goes as follows:

"My Name I Give To Thee"

Dear Town, for whom the flowers are born,

Stars shine, and happy songbirds sing,

What can my evening give to thy morn,

My Winter to Thy Spring? 

A life not void of pure intent

With small desert of praise or blame;

The Love I felt, the Good I meant,

I leave Thee with My Name.

I think that is a Jim Dandy poem, don't you? When I think of California, I think of happy times at the University of California at Santa Barbara, dipping white corn chips in a homemade guacamole or salsa. In Santa Barbara, every day is a good day. People there complain about the weather that is so perfect you feel as if you are living in Heaven. People seem better looking and more happy and tanned than human beings living in other places in the world. One day I will return to Santa Barbara just to walk on the beach (and avoid the oil on the sand that washes in from the oil rigs), and hang out on State Street in downtown. I will eat a fish taco there and my wardrobe will be a Hawaiian style shirt, shorts,  and flip-flops. I may never return to the Northwest. But this is far in the future, when I am old and rich.