The Wisdom of Stooges.

My son and I watched six hours of The Three Stooges, due to his illness.

The Farrelly Brother’s film, The Three Stooges opens on April 13th. I would have expected it to open on April Fool’s Day, because of all the fools America has produced, other than the Marx Brothers, few can compare to the Stooges for physical comedy. http://www.threestooges.com/movie/

Their humor was the foundation for later comic pairings, seen in Trains, Planes, and Automobiles, What About Bob? Wayne’s World, and Dumb and Dumber.

My son, Sam, when he was little, had osteoitis, which is a swelling of the joints. Sam’s collarbone, in particular, used to swell to three times its normal size. The problem started when Sam was about six years of age, and lasted until he was eleven. Sam often woke my wife and I from our sleep. I had been given a six-hour VHS tape of Three Stooges shows by a friend at work, so in the wee hours of the mornings, Sam and I sat in the living room and watched it, at least twice a week for two years. Sam usually fell asleep after an hour and I carried him to bed. The problem became so severe that my wife and I took Sam for an extensive series of tests. He endured blood tests, MRI, CAT scans, X-Rays, and was on prescription pain medication for three years. Finally Sam had a biopsy done at OHSU, a children’s hospital in Portland, when it appeared he might have a cancerous growth in his collarbone. They were wrong, and Sam was left with a long scar.

Due to his bouts with osteoitis, Sam missed out on the sports young boys often participate in, such as little league. One day we were in the back yard and I suggested Sam try to hit a baseball. He lacked confidence, but I encouraged him to try. He took a few swings and he could not hit the ball. Finally I told him to imagine the ball was all the pain he had been through. Two swings later he hit the ball so hard it nearly took my head off. And for the next half-hour he cracked balls off the fence and the trees. I had tears in my eyes and so did he. This is one of our favorite memories. It was a breakthrough moment.

I never thought The Three Stooges were hysterically funny. My humor is more akin to Ground Hog Day, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Dkej22sn3U&feature=related or the Coen Brother's classic, Raising Arizona, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3-Y6UdDNWU&feature=related  I don’t plan on seeing the new Three Stooges film. Some films in Hollywood should never be remade. My Dad loved The Three Stooges; he was big on physical humor, and born when Vaudeville was still in full swing. Dad’s humor was never my humor. Seeing Dad make fart noises by putting his hand in his armpit, and flapping his arm up and down like a chicken, never did anything for me. But when you grow up with a father like this, you tend to be warped forever. I certainly am.

 I never saw Dad laugh more than when I took my parents to see “Throw Momma From the Train.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kt_aFCpebpY&feature=fvwrel The premise of Throw Momma From the Train is as follows: an aspiring writer, Owen, (Danny DeVito) in Professor Larry Donner’s (Billy Crystal) writing class, is inspired by Donner’s suggestion that he would learn something from the Hitchcock film “Strangers On A Train.” The storyline of the Hitchcock film is that two strangers make a deal to kill each other’s spouses. Owen hates his domineering mother (Anne Ramsey), and believes, after overhearing Donner rant about how he wants to kill his ex-wife, due to her having stolen his first fiction novel, (and has become a bestseller), that he and Donner could reenact the double murder of Hitchcock's film. Owen follows Donner’s ex-wife on a cruise ship in Hawaii do fulfill his half of the deal. He finds Donner's wife at the stern of the boat, and is about to push her overboard, but as he reaches to push her off the back of the boat, she drops an earring and falls of her own accord. Owen then phones Donner from Hawaii to convey the code word, “criss-cross,” meaning he expects Donner to now kill his mother. Donner, fearing he will be arrested soon for his wife’s murder, and having no alibi, reluctantly agrees to Owen’s bizarre proposal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1jj73Nw58I&feature=endscreen&NR=1

In films, the Stooges were commonly known by their first names: "Moe, Larry, and Curly" and "Moe, Larry, and Shemp," among other lineups. They first started as "Ted Healy and his Stooges" which contained Moe, Larry and Shemp. "The Three Stooges" film trio was originally composed of Moe Howard, brother Curly Howard and Larry Fine. Shemp Howard replaced brother Curly, when Curly suffered a debilitating stroke in May of 1946.

After Shemp's death from a heart attack in November of 1955, he was replaced by comedian Joe Besser, after the use of film actor Joe Palma to film four Shemp-era shorts. Ultimately, Joe DeRita (nicknamed "Curly Joe") replaced Joe Besser by 1958. The act regained momentum throughout the 1960s as popular kiddie fare until Larry Fine's paralyzing stroke in January 1970 effectively marked the end of the act proper. Moe tried unsuccessfully one final time to revive the Stooges with longtime supporting actor Emil Sitka filling in for Larry. Larry ultimately succumbed to a series of strokes in January 1975, followed by Moe, who died of lung cancer in May 1975.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utZM0NywEes&feature=related

I write comedy screenplays and novels. Two excerpts of my comedies will be performed by the Seattle Theatre. http://www.theatrereaders.com/ The recent snowfall caused the performance last night to be delayed. They were to read from my screenplay, “The Accordion.” The log line of this screenplay is as follows: A teenager separated from his parents when he was six years old, by the French invasion of Mexico, must not only discover who he is, but thwart an ancient curse on his family, with the help of a beautiful, accordion playing Gypsy.

 My theory about comedy is essentially the same as Kahlil Gibran’s. He wrote: Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears. And how else can it be?

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven? And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives? When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight. Some of you say, "Joy is greater than sorrow," and others say, "Nay, sorrow is the greater." But I say unto you, they are inseparable.

Ditto.

Chlorine: Nice to meet you, hope you guessed my name. But what's puzzling you, is the nature of my game.

Chlorine, our friend, and constant companion, floating in, and around our bodies.

I am allergic to two things: wool, and chlorine. I can take wool in small doses. I like sheep. They're nice. I will pet sheep. Chlorine is like poison to me.

When I was six years old I took swimming lessons. The lessons were held in an outdoor pool in November. No, maybe not November, but it seemed like it. The water temperature was about sixty  degrees. For a kid with 1% body fat, as I had, jumping into that cold of water was suicide. The first thing most of the kids did when they jumped in the pool was to urinate. It was a natural reaction to drowning, our minds thought that if we lightened our payloads we would float. Some did, but I was a better sinker than a floater. The swim instructor's name was Miss Hersog. She was  a tall fat thirty-something year old woman who looked like a Martian in her pink rubber swim cap. Our lessons began at eight in the morning, and involved holding our breath underwater, back and forth, for forty minutes. When you go under water that many times, the thought was that eventually you would relax and become accustomed to drowning and drinking mouthfuls of urine laced water. The chlorine was doing strange things to all of us, but it was peeling off layers of my skin. I looked like the Creature from the Black Lagoon after each swimming lesson. Miss Hersog sighed as I dragged my skinny white body out of the pool after my chemical dip. She would say, "Go take a shower," with her steel blue eyes. The only thing she ever said to me was, "No, you may not come up, yet!" I heard this through the water, and it sounded like German. She had her hand on top of my head, holding me under with her fat German hand. I don't remember her speaking to me when I was above water in the three week lesson. She loved to blow her whistle. When she blew her whistle, all the kids stopped talking and turned to listen to her booming voice. I often stayed under the water because I had become accustomed to drowning. There I was, lying on my back in the deep end, my cheeks puffed out with air, my lungs burning with the need to breathe. I was intrigued by watching the bubbles escape my mouth; they warbled back and forth as they rose. My myopic challenged, burning red eyes, watched the kids thrashing around above me. I learned it is possible to stay underwater for over six minutes if you relax and don't care about your dying brain cells. I wore a glow in the dark watch that was waterproof to fifteen feet. I checked it often to see what time I had left before I drowned. When the time was up, I would push off the bottom with my legs, and pop out of the water like a cork. One time I did a triple axle and stuck the landing on my towel, which was spread out just for that purpose. After three weeks my hair was a shade of green, and whatever tan I'd had had been sterilized and floated like pond scum on the pool's surface.

My parents did not know they were killing me. When the lessons ended, they were disappointed I had not learned to swim. I had, however, learned to drown really well. I was relieved; I had escaped Auschwitz. I had a 50% content of chlorine in my body; there was no room for bacteria. If I ate yogurt the chlorine killed it in seconds. I swore I would never swim in a public pool again. I did learn to swim, though it took five years. I learned in the creek on my parent's property, where bacteria were everywhere. It turned out that all that underwater drowning training had made me a very good diver. I would dive to the bottoms of rocky pools to clear the boulders out so I would have to tread water. Crawdads scurried from under the boulders. I wore a mask and I felt at home in the non-chlorinated water. I grew gills when adolescence arrived and no one noticed.

I first discovered swimming in the ocean when I lived in Texas. I was a late bloomer; I did not realize that most people in the world had swum in the ocean. I didn't try it until I was nineteen years old. Later, in college, I roomed with a guy named Marshall, who told me stories of his brother and he riding their bicycles off the pier in Newport Beach, California. The bikes had ropes on them and the ropes were tied to the brother's ankles. This was not that unusual. Boys in California were much better swimmers than boys raised in Oregon. They also had better tans, and a zest for life. In California, they baptize people in the ocean. People who live in Oregon never try this because the window for sunny beach weather is limited to just a few days. The water temperature reaches forty-five degrees on those days and people in Oregon go crazy over the balmy seas.

In California, they also baptize people in swimming pools. The Jacuzzi is a place the Holy Spirit likes to hang out I suppose. In many coastal California towns people have swimming pools in their back yards. It saves on cutting the grass that you cannot water. The pools were usually not very creatively designed. A few in Malibu were shaped like guitars, but most pools built in the 1960s were rectangular. Pools built in the 1970s have curves, and pools built recently look like lagoons on tropical islands. But Southern Californians have almost no water for swimming pools, so mostly they have a lot of big holes in back yards.  I attended a number of baptisms that were held at swimming pools. I was baptized in a church on Turnpike Avenue in Santa Barabara. I wore a wet suit. The baptismal basin had more chlorine than a load of laundry swishing around in a celebrity's washing machine in Bel Air. I never got in the pools. I knew it would kill me. As an adult I have managed to evade most of the chlorine in the world. I have installed filters on my shower sprays and sink faucets, and I filter my water. Had I known, in 1980, that a bottle of water would sell for $2.00 a bottle, I would have figured out a way to make some money on it. Ah, but that time is passed. Other chlorine haters thought up that idea. Chlorine has been added to municipal water supplies since 1908, though its use was not nationwide. Today, over 1.5 billion people do not have access to good clean water, which is to say, not laced with our friend, Mr. Chlorine.  As a bacteria killer, chlorine reigns supreme. As a gas there is nothing so beautiful to behold as a cloud of chlorine drifting over a battlefield killing people. Like that song, "Killing Me Softly." Let's take a stroll down Chlorine Boulevard to learn more about this wonderful chemical and its blessings, shall we? The chemical element chlorine is a corrosive, poisonous, greenish-yellow gas that has a suffocating odor and is 2 1/2 times heavier than air. Chlorine belongs to the group of elements called halogens. The halogens combine with metals to form compounds called halides. Chlorine is manufactured commercially by running an electric current through salt water. This process produces free chlorine, hydrogen, and sodium hydroxide. Chlorine is changed to its liquid form by compressing the gas, the resulting liquid is then shipped to children's wading pools throughout the free world. Liquid chlorine is mixed into drinking water and swimming pools to destroy bacteria. It also kills the children in the pools and the human beings, and the animals that drink it. Ah well. So it goes.

Chlorine is a natural born killer, and not just of little kids and adults in swimming pools.  This was first proved in World War I, on April 22, 1915, at the start of the Second Battle of Ypres. The Ypres Salient, held by the British, Canadians and French, ran for about 10 miles, and skirted German occupied territory for five miles.  A combination of French and Algerian troops held the line to the left, and British and Canadians held the line to the right. Nobody really wanted to fight, but their leaders told them to, and they had bought into the idea that war is a romantic and patriotic thing to do with your day. During that morning, the Germans bombarded the allied lines around Ypres, but after a while they ran out of shells, so they sent some schmuck into town to get a a hundred kegs or so of beer. Towards evening, at around 5 pm, the bombardment began again. The Germans were drunk and getting drunker. They couldn't tell which side of the Howitzer they were to load. The French and Algerian troops only wanted to write long love letters to their sweethearts in beautiful but archaic cursive writing, play love songs on their accordions, harmonica, and fiddles. Suddenly one of them noticed a curious yellow-green cloud drifting slowly towards their line. Trees were wilting in its path. The French believed the cloud was a way for the German infantry to advance, so they waited. The effects of the chlorine gas were severe, not to mention a rather mean and vindictive way to win a war. It took the French years to get over it. They made impressionistic paintings about it. They were resentful because cheating with poisonous gas lacked decorum and good taste. War was a romantic thing back then. It still is, but most don't believe that now. This is perhaps due to the many young men who came back from wars without lungs or limbs. Within seconds after inhaling the chlorine gas, the allies' respiratory organs shut down. The men writhed in agony because it is hard to be a killing machine when you cannot breathe. The panic-stricken air hungry allied troops ran, leaving their damaged lungs sitting on the ground, gasping of air. The lungs couldn’t even sing a decent French love song, so they just lay there trying to breathe on their own. One lung was heard to say, “J'ai un mauvais jour aujourd'hui.” (I’m having a bad day today). The German high command were astounded that the gas had worked so well. They stood with their beer steins and sausages in hand, and watched the allies run. Then they put on lederhosen and did traditional dances, and before they knew it a couple of hundred blond haired wenches with their hair in braids showed up, and after that the German troops didn’t feel like waging a decent or indecent war, with or without poisonous chlorine gas. So the allies eventually came back, picked up their ruined lungs and bludgeoned the Germans with good stiff baguettes, and that was the end of that. The bruised and bloodied Germans ran with their wenches back to the fatherland. One remarked, Chlorine: Gottgeschenk zur Menschlichkeit! (God's gift to humanity!) They had opened up a four mile wide gap in the allies' defenses, but they just ran out of chutzpah. Chutzpah would also run out of Germany when Hitler showed up twenty years later. Their hesitation to seize the advantage cost the Germans what could have been a decisive victory. Ah well.

The world has fallen in love with bottled water and filters that remove chlorine and other harmful things from water. Ah, but hold on to your hats, we now have a new culprit. Bisphenol A is leaching from plastics, and if you've been in any grocery in North America you know that there are literally tons of plastic surrounding all the food and drink you are consuming. Recently I heard on the news that Bisphenol A is leaching into canned soups. It is even worse for living things than chlorine. We can thank our friends at Monsanto for both of these chemical wonders. They also made Napalm. God bless them - they sure know how to win a war that cannot be won! Amen. Napalm is even better at ruining lungs than chlorine. They also gave us DDT. Thank you, Monsanto!


I may not be a rocket scientist, but it seems clear to me that my only hope is to begin plans to live on a piece of land away from metropolitan water supplies, plastics, chemicals, and war mongers. I will not wait for the missiles to bomb us back to the Stone Age. I have no choice, I will have to become an organic hippie dude. It will be my own personal anti-industrial revolution.

Goodbye, Mr. Chlorine, I simply can't take you anymore. Can't live with you, and can't live without you. But as Rosanna-Danna used to say, "It's always something."

My Experience in TV Land.

I owe a lot of my comic leanings to my early years watching TV. (And Myopia)

You would not think that bad events could bring about change for the good, but they often do. Perhaps it is the universe's way to balance things. Or when bad thing happen, a hole is left in the fabric of whatever this reality is made of, and good naturally fills it.

When I was eight years old we had a black and white television. It sat like an idol in our small living room and at least four or five of us kids would sit about two feet from it to watch shows like I Love Lucy, Dobie Gillis, The Patty Duke Show, Leave It To Beaver, Ed Sullivan, or The Honeymooners. I was too small to remember much about the shows. I barely remember when the Beatles were on the Ed Sullivan show. I don't know if I actually saw the show or saw a show about that show. But what I do remember is the day I was looking at a tall vase that sat on top of that TV one afternoon. The yellow and green vase held three purple Iris blossoms my mother had cut from her garden that morning. I reached to touch an Iris petal and the vase, being top heavy,  tipped over onto the back of television. The program that was on escapes me, but it was probably while a commercial for Brillo pads was on. And when the water from the vase met the big long hot tubes in the back of the set, a mushroom cloud rose upwards, smelling of burned out cathodes. I don't even know what a cathode is, but it sounds right.

My parents did not punish me, which was a miracle in itself. I do not know what my mother and father discussed that night, but the next day we had a brand new color TV where the old set sat in our living room. I do not know where my parents bought the TV, but we were only the second family in the neighborhood with a color TV. And owning a color TV was a sign of upward mobility. Now when we kids huddled around the set, Dad would order us to get back. We already had damaged retina's and were nearsighted. The optometrist bills alone ran into the thousands of dollars, in 1964 dollars.

The set was enormous; it had fancy wood turnings and a crisscross wood pattern that lay on top of a textured greenish colored fabric, that covered the TV's speakers. The TV was  Victorian in form, and we all felt a bit more refined in its presence. The new rules were that nothing could ever be set on top of the television. Only my mother was allowed to dust the TV, when it was off, with lemon scented spray. The lemony scented TV was our informal god. The new TV soon began showing us live Vietnam war footage in living color. The former black and white shows were now in Technicolor. It was like when Dorothy walked out of her house into the Land of Oz.

It was like in the film, Pleasantville, where a teenage brother and sister, with the help of a magic remote control, (delivered by Don Knotts) become actors in a TV show. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUI9N-fCX7o  This film addresses so much about the change television has made in the world, as well as the technological leap from black and white to color in films and television. Once the brother and sister arrive in Pleasantville, they set about opening the eyes of the bland citizens of the small fictional town of Pleasantville. Soon, David's (Toby  Maguire) and Jennifer's (Reese Witherspoon) meddling gets out of hand. At first the changes seem for the better: streets that used to simply end now continued, books which had no words were filled with stories, roses and apples turned red, young people discovered love and sex, a wife became liberated, a shop owner discovered his artistic talents. David realizes that the people in the town are real, and has a moment of doubt that what he and his sister have done may not be right - until he sees that much of the change has made the people happier. Taking a bite from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is a necessary thing for human beings. We were meant to learn from our mistakes. In Pleasantville, when people took that bite, so to speak, they changed to full color people. Their world got bigger. At first the colored people were a minority, until one by one most of the townspeople were changed. The final showdown occurred in a courtroom, where the town's mayor becomes so emotionally charged with David's arguments that he changes as well. The symbol is easy to comprehend, and akin to the racial rights movement that swept America in the 1960s. Black people were accepted, based primarily on the color of their skin. In Pleasantville, and in America, the dreams blacks and other minorities were broadened to all the colors of the rainbow.

When I first saw Ed Sullivan on television, he looked as dead and stiff as a man could look. When technicolor arrived, Sullivan became more alive to me. This was the beginning of the Golden Age of Television. From 1964 to 1969 a slew of new shows were introduced. The Smother's Brothers, Hee-Haw, Rowen & Martin's 'Laugh-In,' I Dream of Jeannie, Green Acres, Gilligan's Island, Star Trek, Pettycoat Junction, Lost in Space, The Munsters, The Addams Family, and many soap opera's, as well as films made their debuts.

Our country's leaders had sent the young men to fight in Vietnam, a war many were starting to not believe in by 1966, despite patriotic songs about the Green Beret. The sitcoms kept us ignorant and laughing through it all. CBS-TV's news anchor, Walter Cronkite, was already the most popular newscaster in America, and he was now ruddy cheeked. My parents hushed us while Cronkite delivered the news each night, such as when Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater in the presidential election. The memory of the assassination of John F. Kennedy was still fresh in our minds, but in my mind, the only thing that mattered was watching comedies on TV.

I honed my skills and did impersonations of people like Maxwell Smart, and cartoon characters. Television was the ultimate diversion from reality. My mother, who perhaps feared the television would replace God, made sure we went to church each Sunday. She often tried to pry us away from the TV, and told us to go outside and play. Naturally we boys had war battles in the woods. We had shows like Combat to mimic, and the ongoing Vietnam war footage. Dirtclods became hand grenades, sticks became machine guns. My sisters played with Barbies, having been brainwashed themselves by the never ending commercials about Barbie and Ken. One day while playing with Ken, his head came off. The girls could not get the head back on, so they melted it on with matches.

We boys also had a love of fire. Mounted on a large sheet of plywood in our dungeon-like basement, was a model train track. Imagine a basement with a dirt floor and a coal burning furnace, where spiders grew to enormous sizes. My younger brother, Bob, and I were not afraid of going down to the basement, it was where our dog, Mitzi, had had her pups. It was just another place to play our war games. We put plastic army soldiers on the trains and lit them on fire. The soldiers limbs dripped like candles. Seeing how well they burned and melted, we place the soldiers on rafts, which we set on fire and let float down the irrigation ditch that acted as a natural border between our front yard and a pear orchard. This was a time when DDT was still being used on food crops. I suppose there was plenty of it in the fruit we occasionally ate from the orchards and in the irrigation ditch. But when you are a kid you don't think about things like that. It was only years later that I learned that the maker of DDT was also the maker of Agent Orange and Napalm, our dear friend Monsanto. Monsanto sold a lot of products on television, under different brand names. Nowadays they genetically modify all the seed crops worldwide. All the corn syrup that company makes could cover the planet. 

When my family moved from Hood River to take over my grandparents' farm five miles away, my father bought another television. This one was even more fancy than the old color set. We had a console type stereo that looked like it was made by the same manufacturer. By then the world had embraced avocado and orange as acceptable colors for living rooms and kitchens. The avocado rug covered an acre and a half in our new living room. My parents had become socialites in a big way. Their round dancing and square dancing friends gathered there after dances. The living room was so wide you had to use a megaphone to keep a conversation going with someone sitting on the forty foot long avocado green couch. My brother Bob and I had embraced the hippie movement. though it came late to the Northwest. My Dad allowed us to grow our hair over our ears for the first time. Mom was wearing shorter skirts and Dad grew sideburns. The television was still a focal point of the living room, but a much smaller one, and dwarfed by the size of the room and the enormous twenty foot picture window that looked out on a cherry orchard, a mountain. The Columbia River could be seen far off in the distance.

We had helped our father build the house, dubbed "the Party House." It had taken ten years for my father to nail on the baseboard moldings. Until we dug drainage ditches, frogs miraculously appeared each Spring in one room of our daylight basement. In the basement the seeds of rebellion were sown. It began with a nice wood burning stove we could hang out by on winter nights, and expanded to include a bumper pool table, and a couch. Before long my brother Bob and I threw parties when my parents were out. We planted young marijuana plants in my mother's empty plastic pots. I had grown tangerine plants the first year in the new house, and the plants had done well, so when my mother asked me what the new plants were I quickly told her they were tangerine plants. The ruse worked for a month until the plants took on the form that even my mother realized were not tangerine plants. This was the age of rebellion. My sister had taken up with a boy who was trouble, and near the end of her senior year in high school she got pregnant. This was the beginning of my return to sanity. My brother took a few more years, but I had had enough of rebellion. I began to lose interest in the old TV shows and began to entertain ideas about what I would do with my life.

Many years later I found myself writing a directing TV commercials, sitcom ideas, and  screenplays. I cannot help but think that my early indoctrination into TV Land affected the course of my life. I do not know what became of the TV in my parents house. I assume it ended up in a landfill somewhere. TV sparked my sense of humor, and for that I am thankful.

I own a big flat screen TV now, but I haven't watched it much lately. I am watching the action in my head as I write stories. There are never reruns or commercials there.

Losing Love is Like a Window in Your Heart

She loves me, she loves me not. She loves me, she loves me not. And so it goes, this thing called love.

I need a tee shirt with the following words silk screened across the front of it: “I’m not worried about 2012. I survived disco, new wave, and falling in love. I can survive anything.”

Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1tTN-b5KHg came out in 1986, when I was just getting my career underway. I had experienced the early 1980s in California, which was as perfect as a place to be during this time as anywhere. I had a roommate that used phrases like 'mondo,' 'stellar,' and 'way cool.' The weather in Santa Barbara was fabulous, every day. I was a late bloomer, but I was in my prime. I also had five years of work experience under my belt. When I left San Francisco, California in 1985, where I'd worked for two years as an art director, I took a job in Central Oregon at a magazine publisher. In the studio I worked in I had a stereo set on a shelf that was on most of the time. Music was always my raison d'être, and when I staged photo shoots the photographer, the models, and stylists,  were working to the beat of the music.  We were young and life was good. I was newly married and my wife was pregnant with my first child.

When Paul Simon’s “Graceland” album came out that year I immediately loved it. The line I liked from the title track: “I have reason to believe we will all will be received in Graceland.” Simon had written the songs on the album during and after his failed marriage to Carrie Fisher. His personal life was in shambles and his future as a songwriter was in jeopardy. As an ASCAP songwriter I understand that chaos often bring opportunity for creativity, like the saying that when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FEBDNJtNWk&feature=related

We have diamonds on the soles of our souls. You just have to walk in faith and make the diamonds sparkle. And if you fall in and out of love then at least you have tried. Love, good love, sticks to the soles of your shoes like bubblegum on a sidewalk. It is like the shine off a National guitar. Maybe we all should have a reason to believe we all will be received in Graceland. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teCJiqTLKQg

Everybody sees you’re blown apart when you have a broken heart. You got diamonds on the soles of your shoes, but you got the blues everywhere else. Everybody here knows exactly what I’m talking about. Diamonds on the soles of our shoes.

Listen: I am a die hard romantic. I watch old romantic movies; I listen to old love songs. A long time ago, when I was thirteen, I fell in love for the first time. And when you fall in love a lot of things start to percolate. People say we are crazy, and we are: crazy in love. And now, here when most would tell me, give up on love, the train has left the station – love has landed in my life. I am falling in love again and it is like that old song, “Sooner or later, love is gonna get you.” I didn’t find this woman, she found me. I was lonely like a lot of single men are. I joined two dating sites. I sometimes got off of them. Seven years have passed since my long, mostly unhappy marriage ended. There have been a couple of contenders for my love in this time period. All were blonde. They say the third time’s a charm, and so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when yet another notice was delivered to my email in box informing me that a woman had written me an email. This was a site called “Book of Matches,” I regretted having joined almost immediately, and habitually deleted notices from BOM for two years. But for some reason I decided to read this woman's email. The woman had read my profile and told me that what I had written on my profile had taken her breath away. I wondered if she had asthma or she was deranged. I only wrote what I feel, I didn't expect it to win some woman's heart.  I hadn’t taken anyone’s breath away before. Was she a crazy person?

She was a widow, and blonde. Her husband had died when his heart suddenly ruptured less than a year ago. Her daughters had told her to not date for at least four years, but she had not listened to them. And now this woman was writing me, and unlike all the others I’d written she wanted me to write long emails. She wanted to learn French, go dancing with me, play tennis, and make a life together. She lives in the town where all my things are still stored in Oregon. The coincidences were overwhelming. Was she stalking me? Did she think I had diamonds on the soles of my shoes?

So I wrote her back, and it began. She kept surprising me with her depth. She was a Christian, and had a lovely, loving family. She sent photos of herself with her grown daughters and granddaughters baking in her kitchen. Something in me wanted to join them, but when a man has been betrayed as I have been betrayed, it is hard to let the walls crumble. It is hard to be vulnerable again, and trust.

In eighth grade I fell hard for a girl named Annie Wells. Annie was a big girl, about 5’7” and blonde. Her family owned one of the many orchards in the Hood River valley. I had almost no experience with girls, so I did what I thought a guy was supposed to do, I did a lot of showing off. And Annie was my fan. One day on the athletic field I came up behind her and snapped the back of her bra through her shirt. I don’t know why I did this other than I didn’t know the proper way to say hello. To her and my horror, the bra came undone and she ran, red faced, the several hundred yards back to the school. The romance had begun. Realizing that I was madly in love with her, Annie blushed whenever I came around. I didn’t know the next step in the process so I had my friend go to a convenience store near our middle school to buy her a five-dollar ring. I didn’t have the courage to give it to her, so he did it for me. And then we were engaged. Like most adolescent love affairs Annie and I did not court for long. We didn’t even kiss. There was a lot of nervous looks and walking by each other in the hallways. And then the school year ended and my family moved to an adjacent county and I began high school.

Three years passed. I went to a county fair with my brother and his date, and my date. And there was Annie, about an inch taller, and still in love with me. I could see it in her eyes. My date stood a hundred feet away by my car waiting for me while I talked to Annie and her girlfriend. Annie wanted me to stay and go to a dance with them but I had to go. I never saw Annie again, but I still think about her.

When a person gives their heart it is a precious gift that we must be careful not to trample. This woman who is writing and phoning me now is a new love. I must be careful and do nothing to wound her. It is a scary thing to give your heart to someone. You must always be honest and respectful. How can a person know if a new love is right or wrong? It is like jumping into a lake you have never swum in before. There may be rocks; the water may be shallow. You could hurt yourself. Be careful.

To me the most romantic scene was in Casablanca, where Humphrey Bogart (Rick) is with Ingrid Bergman, (Elsa) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wo2Lof_5dy4  She has asked Sam to play, “As Time Goes By.” Rick comes in and scolds Sam, saying he told him to never play the song again, and then Rick sees Elsa. Their eyes say it all: the love is still there. But Elsa is married, and though she thought she was a widow when Rick and she first met – she must now face Rick and tell him the truth. And Rick must do the thing he does not want to – he must let her go and do the right and heroic thing and save Elsa and her husband from the Nazi’s.

Time heals all wounds, but it doesn’t erase memories. A new love makes new memories, and in time I think a new love can be better than all loves before it. When a woman is a widow, a man can never replace her husband. You can’t be with someone because they remind you of someone you once loved – but lost. It is human nature to do this. Love can make a deep wound in us, and the only way to close up the wound is to fill it with a new fresh love. You can fall in love at any age. You just have to start.

The Substance of Things Not Seen.

You have to believe. That is all there is to life, love, and happiness.

Remember when you were a child, and the world was a miraculous place where any dream you had would come true? Think about a specific day when you were truly happy and I will guess it was when you were a child. When I think of my childhood there are freeze frame clips in my head. I remember my mother and father dancing in a ballroom, I smell cookies sitting on a wire rack, and my mother in an apron saying I could have one. I see icicles hanging from the rain gutter of my childhood home, a small yellow house by a pear orchard. There was a stillness in that rural neighborhood I rarely find these days. Winter was time off from school. It was made up of making snowmen, snow forts, sledding, and snowball fights. The icicles sparkled in the morning sunshine, and I snapped them off as if they were fine pieces of art to be collected and saved. I remember the fresh snow that lined the fine limbs of our willow tree. My mother stored summer in Ball canning jars, in a pantry. There were rows of golden yellow peaches, plums, pears, apricots, and cherries, in a perpetual state of ripeness: the sweetness of summer. In the winter, after a day in the snow, my father, brothers, sisters, and I gathered at the small kitchen table and had tomato soup, and homemade bread. We had peanut butter on celery sticks. Then the jars would be set on the table. Dad would loosen their rims, and open their lids, and Mom would put the fruit in our bowls with a large spoon. When we tasted the fruit we were reminded that winter was not forever. Many seasons have passed, but the memory remains. Some things are timeless: Christmas presents, first communions, a broken arm, standing on the church steps while my mother wiped the dirt from my cheeks before we went in. My first kiss; my first fight; my father driving me to a free-throw tournament; my grandfather - wearing his fine blue striped overalls - telling me stories of his youth. In the mind of God I am still being born, and sitting at that dining room table with those peaches in my bowl, and I am in Heaven too, all at the same time.

When  I am in doubt about the likelihood of my dreams coming true, I remember my parents and grandparents and how they were here, and once young, and my same age, alive and in love, and once they too were children. They had hopes like me: dreams that faded and were never realized. When I am down, thinking of my failures, my ruined aspirations, I think of a scripture found in Hebrews 11:1 "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." There is much to be learned from this wisdom. It is saying, "Never stop dreaming and believing."


I have a theory that we will all be children in Heaven. We will never have to grow up, and our lives on Earth will be a distant memory. We will know, finally, who we really are.

The world can get you down if you follow its belief system, that possessions are lasting. The world preaches a gospel that goes, "When pigs fly." It is the gospel of doubt in the miraculous. It is easy to have faith in the things we see. We have proof. Only fools believe in the invisible things. Or do they? The irony is that the things will all pass away; the things that are invisible will last forever. They are faith, integrity, courage, honesty, persistence, commitment, fidelity, trust, love, joy, and hope. We are only expressions of God's dream - of God's heart. We are beings of light, as any physicist can tell you. If there were spaceships small enough they could fly right through us. We are illusions and the world and its things are illusions, because behind these molecules called you and me, and everything else, is the invisible heart of God. 

When I was nine years old, the priest of our church one Sunday described the Holy Spirit as being like a wind. This made sense to me. I had seen the wind fill the white sheets of my mother's clothesline in our backyard in the summertime. I had pressed my face against the sheets and felt the clean warm cotton massaging my cheeks. The sheets were like the sails of a ship. Where would they sail to if they could?  I had enormous dreams, full as the sheets of my mother's clothesline. I dreamt of being an astronaut going to the moon, being a geologist, and winning the Olympics as a runner, or pole-vaulter. I marveled at the structure of crystals, clouds, the architecture of a butterflies' wing, the scent and color of a rose in my mother's garden. What magnificent power and intelligence had made such things? I had a deep curiosity to find this force, this being, this Creator of all things. And I sensed then that this force was the force of pure love.

In the film, "Hook," Robin Williams has to remember he is Peter Pan. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRspLSB2J-E&feature=related He is a lawyer who deals in facts. When we look at the face value of things, and do not see the unseen, we end up being someone other than who we are. We forget. It takes faith to fly to Neverland and be who we are. But once we do it, we know the way. It takes a supernatural thing to get us back to seeing like children see things. Fairy dust. Being a parent is one way to remember. Tragedies can wake us, so can falling in love. I remember when  I became a father. There was my baby girl looking at me as if she had arrived from another planet. She had; the planet named Heaven. The invisible kingdom.

We get amnesia sometimes. When we were children, laughter was easy, and smiles were a natural expression of our state of mind. The state of our souls. Like Peter Pan we must shed the doubt and fly into the arms of love. If summer can be captured in a Ball mason jar - love, faith, and joy can fill the container of our souls. And like a child you can say "I have captured it. Do you want to see?" Peter could not see the invisible food until he found his true self, then he was able to eat as much as he desired. The invisible things, like love, are like food for our souls.

In the movie, "American Beauty" there is a part that speaks so clearly about the unseen things, and the nature of this unseen Creator. In the film, Jane Burnham (Thora Birch), daughter of a failed real estate mom, Carolyn Burnham (Annette Bening), and Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a frustrated salesman, forms an unlikely relationship with a neighbor boy named Ricky Fitts, (Wes Bentley), who also has strange parents (Col. Frank Fitts USMC, and Barbara Fitts - Chris Cooper and Allison Janney). Jane and Ricky sit in Ricky's room and watch one of his films, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB0th8vNLxo that has to do with a plastic bag dancing in a small whirlwind by a brick wall. If you find yourself doubting there is a Creator, please watch this clip.

The rest of the movie paints a portrait of American values gone awry. It shows clearly how the pursuit of material things ultimately leads nowhere. I know something about this aspect of American life. Once I had quite a few possessions, but in the past two years I've been laid low. It has forced me to focus on the invisible things - that matter.

Do pigs fly? Yes, they do, if only in your imagination. Anything is possible to a person who believes. You just have to do a little soul searching to find the wind that will fill your sails. I am ready, how about you?

Thoughts about shoe tossing.

Does this look familiar? It is the work of shoe tossing artists.

There are shoe trees, and there are shoes in trees. I am sure you have seen them: pairs of shoes hanging by their tied laces from elms, maples, oaks, and chestnuts. Shoe tossing has taken on an art form similar to Christo and Jeanne-Claude's fabric drapery, except it is more like festooning than drapery. A tree festooned with shoes is a happier tree, or so advocates of shoe tossing might assert. They are a youthful group, it takes arm power to toss a shoe forty feet or more in the air. I have tossed a shoe or two in my time. I imagine that it takes more than one toss to get the shoe in the right position, whether it is a branch the shoe artist is aiming at or a wire. Shoes, because of their rubber, probably insulate the trees from lightning strikes. If you see a shoe smoldering on a tree or wire after an electrical storm, this theory will have been proven scientifically. 


Opponents of shoe tossing rightfully argue that shoe tossing is nothing more than very specific littering. I believe there may be a link between those who toss shoes in trees to the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien, and his Ents, because when a tree has shoes, the artist is saying to the tree, "Walk!" I have not seen trees walk before, but apparently banana trees do have the capacity to walk up to 15 centimeters per year. Which explains why runners and walkers eat bananas like nobody's business. If some fish can walk, why not a tree? To test this theory, toss a pair of tennis shoes in a banana tree. If the tree puts the shoes on, then we will know with certainty that it is aware of its newfound improved ability to walk. Paint a circle around the base of the tree. Dare it to perform. But most trees do not walk, they only dream of walking. Rigid oaks will send their mighty roots through your foundation looking for a pair of Air Jordan's. I am of the school of thought that plants are in the know about what is going on around them. They are sensitive souls. Trees are among the most artistic of the plant kingdom. One day it is a tree and the next it is your dining room table or your clogs. If a tree branch overlaps another tree branch they can grow together to form all sort of things. Wood is the most wonderful thing the Creator of the Universe thought of. Axel Erlandson agreed with the Creator in that respect. He shaped trees for years. He formed living trees into chairs, ladders, tables, and other things. http://atlasobscura.com/place/gilroy-gardens-dt  I do not know how those trees felt about his tinkerings. I imagine they were fine with it. People in India had been doing it for a thousand years. Trees still whisper about the bridges they made from tree roots. If you are ever in California, you should swing by Erlandson's legacy. There are plenty of chairs to rest in, (they are made out of living trees). As far as I know, shoe tossers do not go there to toss their shoes. It would be like adding something to a Henry Moore or Alexander Calder sculpture.


I  knew a woman who, for eighteen years, had a thing for shoes. She wasn't Imelda Marcos, she was my wife. When we married she brought with her fifteen boxes of mint condition high heels. They were her only possessions at the time. She had sold shoes for the previous ten years in a tiny shoe store in Rock Springs, Wyoming. She had also had a fling with the married shoe store owner, and as far as I know the owner's wife never threw one shoe at her for that indiscretion, though high heels do make formidable weapons in the hands of an angry jealous woman. However, high heels are not the type of shoe professional shoe tossing artists use. It would be like painting with peanut butter. Eventually, my wife, now my ex-wife due to her using her small stylist feet to find other men to play footsie with, gave her shoes to Goodwill. High heels weren't good for working in the garden, and she didn't like to dance, so the shoes found happier feet. I was walking today and saw a pair of plain black dress shoes sitting side by side on the muddy ground near the sidewalk. They had soles but they were lonely, or they had only just met, and one shoe saw the other across the street and voila! it was love. You have to be a brave shoe to cross some of the streets near me. I had the urge to read the thoughts of those shoes, and to toss them over a tree branch, but I let sleeping shoes lie. Eventually someone will come along and put those shoes on and the adventure will continue.


If shoes could talk, what stories they would tell. I do not know how a person could chronicle the story of a pair of shoes. As Nancy Sinatra sang "Those boots are made for walkin' and that's just what they'll do. One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRkovnss7sg This is one of the all-time favorite songs of shoe tossers. Or it should be. For the record, I intend to be cremated, I won't need shoes where I am going. Which makes me wonder why people who are dead need to be wearing shoes in a casket, unless the people who put the shoes on them believe those stories of the walking dead. (There may be shoe fetish people whose lights just went on, who are planning to dig up shoe magnates in cemeteries across the nation.)


I recently bought two pairs of Italian dress shoes from Goodwill. They are in mint condition. I assume the owner died. What business was he in? Did he leave his wife and go back to Italy? Was he knocked out of his shoes when he was hit by a bus? Was he a member of the mob? These are the sorts of questions I have when I look at shoes, especially discarded shoes. Yesterday, while riding a metro bus I sat opposite a man who looked like he came from Northern Africa, possibly from the Ethiopia or Sudan. He was dressed impeccably, and I paid particular attention to his brand new stylish black shoes. You can tell a lot about a person by their shoes. Their shoes tell you whether they are rebels or Republicans. 


Someone did toss a pair of shoes at George Bush http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0125Qrn24EQ Apparently they mistook him for a tree. Bush ducked really well for an old guy. He made a joke about it, by saying that he wanted to let other shoe throwers know he took a Size 10 shoe. It was really big shoe the guy threw. Big shoes can do serious damage. Boot tossing has been popular in New Zealand for many years. There they prefer trees. These people descend from the Scots who are very into tossing things, like stones and the trunks of trees. Scotland may be the ancestral home of many shoe tossers, but no study has been done that I know of. 


The practice of tossing shoes over power lines is called "shoefiti." This may be somehow linked to aficionados of tossing  toilet paper over trees. The thing about that is that at some point the tissue will break down and become part of the environment. You can hose toilet paper off of trees or wait for it to rain. Or leave it up for Halloween. Shoes. however, can festoon a power line or tree for hundreds of years. There may be city departments worldwide devoted to taking shoes out of trees and off power and telephone lines. Shoes were one of the first things primitive man crafted. Sandals woven from sagebrush have been found in a cave in the Summer Lake area of Southeastern Oregon which are over 14,000 years old. Oh, if only those sandals could talk! I do not know if shoe tossing was popular then, but I imagine that it happened by accident one time, and soon there was a fad that swept ancient North America. Mastodons' tusks were a favorite target. A person with lots of shoes was rich. Later the shoes would lose their luster when horses were domesticated. Then shoeing a horse became the thing to do. Perhaps shoes were once tossed onto the backs of horses. But eventually that fell out of favor, and trees became the norm, because horses and mastodons are often moving.


But we'll never know now. But that's the sort of thing I think of when I think of shoes.

The Truth is Out There, people. Welcome to 2012.

The photo I took just before I was abducted in 2008.

There are many theories out there about extraterrestrials. Among the most popular is that we have been visited by extraterrestrials since the beginning. Devotees point to the architectural feats of the ancient world, the sightings of UFO's throughout human history, ancient maps of Antarctica, shown without ice, stories of giants - the Nephilim - found in the Book of  Genesis in the bible, and the stories of Gilgamesh - the giant king of ancient Iraq.

Conspiracy theorists say that there are secretive organizations in America and the world that make it their business to cover up what is known about UFO's. If you are making the Devil's Tower out of mashed potatoes, they know about it and they'll be coming for you. The Illuminati, like NASA, and the Federal Government are alleged to be working together to keep the world in the dark - to keep pandemonium from occurring - if the truth got out. It would mean the end of religions as we know them, the end of hostilities. A new world order would come about, and it isn't the New World Order the industrialists have in mind. They don't want a world without religion, or one where wars can't be waged for profit. It just isn't good economics. But human beings are naturally curious, and consumed by the desire to make sense of our place in the universe, and the Internet has made it a much smaller place. People don't take 'no' for an answer.

One of the first authors to tap into this curiosity we have was  Erich von Däniken. His book, Chariots of the Gods, http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-373807185570806915It  offers proof that evidence exists that we have been visited by aliens in ancient times, and even today. The audio for the online version of this movie was apparently tampered with by aliens; it wobbles like a UFO. Another series of books that shed light on this subject were written by  Graham Hancock. He lucidly and logically shows evidence of alien influences in Earth's architecture and development. Keep an eye on Orion, people. If your pole shifts, sit down and drink a cold ice tea.

Ancient societies revered these visitors as gods. This is what happens when a technologically advanced civilization visits a primitive culture in vehicles that fly. Records of these sky gods are described in the written accounts of ancient societies around the world. In modern times, primitive cultures of the Pacific Islands, after the departure of American troops after World War II,  referred to the Americans as gods and built replicas of airplanes to lure the sky gods back. We see the same thing on the Nazca lines in Peru. The lines are saying, "Please come back, we miss you! Bring back Fruit Loops!"

I grew up in a time when UFO's were being spotted on a daily basis. The United States was UFO crazy. My brother and I would watch the sky at night for UFO's. But with the passage of time, and the lack of a UFO landing on the White House lawn, I decided it wasn't worth thinking about. If they came back, they came back. If they had infiltrated our society and seeded our world with mutants. what could I do about it? Until the day I found myself in a parking lot in Eugene, Oregon. I had my new Nikon camera with me. I noticed that the lights in the parking lot had the shape of classic UFO's. So I took a photo of one of them.

A year passed. I came across the photo in a box and I scanned it. I had become a master of Photoshop, and cloning out the metal post was child's play. And when it was done, I had a flawless photo of a UFO. It was so darn good I showed it to my son and a few friends. And then I decided to test how good it really was. I was living in Hillsboro, Oregon at the time. I had learned of an organization named MUFON, the acronym of Mutual UFO Network. So I went to their site http://www.mufon.com/ and sent them the image. On the form at their site you have to tell them all the particulars about your sighting, so I fabricated a believable story that had the event occurring during the Hillsboro Air Show of 2010.

Two days later I received an email from a MUFON regional director. He was very serious. He said my image was spectacular, and that I would be contacted by another agent, and I was - the following day. The agent wanted footage if I had it, as well as the negatives that showed multiple views of the craft. He would send the images to their laboratory back east to determine the veracity of the sighting. After that I would have to take a lie detector test, and give urine, and sperm. I would be tested to see if I was part alien. I had always thought I was some alien's spawn, but my mother said that was nonsense. Well, now I had the chance to get to the bottom of my DNA. The truth was out there, even if it was founded on a fib.

I wrote MUFON to explain that the negatives were in storage and I wasn't sure where they were due to a huge tumor the aliens' tinkering had caused, and the chip they put in my head.  And then I dropped off the map. Suddenly my little joke had turned too serious. I was glad I'd used an alias and had changed addresses. I envisioned being visited by agents in the middle of the night. Or, worse - the "grays" who would whisk me off to another planet.

Perhaps this may be the year we find out the truth. We have the perfect storm brewing: the return of the UFO's, the culmination of the Mayan prophesy - http://www.adishakti.org/mayan_end_times_prophecy_12-21-2012.htm  - the fulfillment of the prophesies of Nostradamus - http://www.nostradamuspredictions.org/ 

If on December 21, 2012, civilization as we know it does not end, there are going to be a lot of tee shirt makers who will be disappointed. But take my advice, don't mess with the Federal Government or MUFON. Unless you're Agent Scully or Agent Mulder http://www.xfiles.com/