WALKING ON THIN ICE

I strain against our door. It’s a big, old door. It has a metal bar, which I’ve slid away, and a brass padlock, which is open, and a latch mechanism. I’m pulling on the latch mechanism. I put my foot up against the wall to give myself leverage. Still, I can’t get outside.

“Here. I do it,” Steve grunts. “Big strong man do it for little bitty woman.” He opens it, easily.

He points up over the wall across our small alley. “Look, up there. Lavender blossoms.”

We turn round the corner of our street. Rap music damps softly somewhere down the road. As we walk down the steep hill, bird chatter becomes more prominent. I stop to write all this down.

“You’re using your new notebook,” he says.

“Yep. This is a new Kathy. Real-time Kathy. I’m gonna get it all down.”

Steve looks at a small sign on someone’s gate. “Look. I can read French.” This says “Private Property.” He reconsiders, “Or, it could be Privy Private. You never know with the French.”

We walk further down. I smell fresh baked earth. It’s pretty hot today. There’s a certain iron smell dirt gets when it’s this hot.

As though reading my mind, Steve stops to touch the dirt walls which line one side of the road. “It’s soft,” he says. “Just look at that root.” He traces its path, which is open to us because of erosion in the wall.

The exposed roots made me think of mangroves.

“Follow the root down. It goes down and into the root of another tree. That reminds me. The largest life form on this planet is one plant. All the roots are connected. People think it’s a forest, but it’s just one plant.”

“Can’t see the tree for the forest,” I say. “If you google you could use just a couple words: largest, life form, and root. We could find more information about that plant.”

“It’s strange about search engines,” he says. “When I first got on the Internet, Reynolds had to show me everything. But now I’m looking things up on search engines, no longer need his help. One time, Peter said, ‘Why don’t you search for search engines?‘ I put in a query–strange search engines–and came up with all kinds of shit. One had only art with eyeballs in it.”

Now we’re around the bend. There’s another wall dug out of the dirt. “That’s gonna fail,” he says, pointing to the wall.

I say, “You know, they ought to take that multi-tree’d root plant and put it on all the deserts.” I don’t seriously think this would solve anything, but it falls easily from my mouth.

“Aaah, that won’t help. The deserts are spreading, thanks to global warming.” We both recently read the book by Jared Diamond, Collapse. It totally blew our minds. It traces the causes of failed civilizations. The worst culprit is deforestation and consequent desertification.

We come across a set of fenced-in allotments. A couple of fruit trees grow right up against the fence of one of them. “Well, what’s this up here?” A long stalk of grass is lodged in a beautiful blossoming tree. The grass here is like bamboo. Steve plucks the offender off.

“The bees are out in force today,” I notice.

“Big buggers there too,” Steve says. “That one there is the B52 of the bee world.”

“I wonder if France also has a bee problem. It doesn’t seem like it.” I recently read that there’s a bad problem with the bees in the U.S. They’re not thriving, and the beekeepers are worried that they won’t be able to meet demand for pollinating crops.

We walk by another allotment. This one has a bunch of junked cars, and three barking dogs. One dog barks especially viciously, hopping in a circle whose path is governed by a chain. We pass the junkyard, and the next yard has a bird house. It seems the dog barking stirred up miscellaneous poultry. They quack and cluck expressively.

The road is dappled. We’re approaching a creek. The fowl and dogs hush. The noise from the creek gets louder very suddenly, as does noise from some wild birds. The creek seems to urge notes from the birds.

I pause to take more notes, then I complain about the obstructiveness of note-taking to Steve. It’s the same old problem people have with the family camera. They become documentarians rather than actually enjoying the experience. I say, “The world is changing for creative people. People are starting to record everything, blog everything.”

Steve says, “Everybody could record everything. It wouldn’t get you very much, you know that? It’s the selection that matters. All an artist says is, look at this.”

He finds a moss covered twig. Holds it up. “You know what this is?” He asks.

“No. Hmm. You’re horny?”

“No, look. It’s covered on all sides. North is all around us. Now all I have to do is hold this and we’ll never be away from North. I know how to get us through these fucking wildernesses.”

The road past the river goes through vineyards. Steve points around, indicating the circumference of sum of the road and mown side yards. “In my memoir, we have to write about the big water things for cows. I mean, they were big.”

“You mean reservoirs?”

“Yeah, they could be called reservoirs. They’re three feet tall, twenty feet in diameter, made out of tin, filled with water for the cows. I found one out in the middle of the woods with a big fish in it. Could never figure out how this big fish got into the reservoir in the middle of the woods.”

“I put one of these reservoirs as a boat on the pond,” he continues. “I’d get in and pole my way to the middle of the pond. That way, I’d be safe. Nobody could sneak up on me.”

“Now, Wild Bill Hickok, there’s a man I can understand. Aces and eights, that’s a dead man’s hand. He always sat with his back to the wall. Didn’t trust reality. Wanted to see who, no, what was sneaking up on him. Cuz it ain’t always people.”

“I’ll tell you something else. If we were walking down a gully and a flash flood was coming, I’d probably know in time to get us up the side. Cuz there’d be a background noise that didn’t fit the pattern. There’d be an earth vibe that didn’t make sense. And there’d be other things that I don’t even know about yet until I experience them. But what it comes down to is there’d be things that didn’t fit the pattern, didn’t fit in.”

He files his nails briskly, standing on the road in front of one of many, many vineyards. It’s hot and bright out.

“Normally, first thing when you move to a place, you listen, subconsciously. Cuz you have to know the patterns in that place. I gotta write that down for my next blog: place space base.”

We start walking again. I put the notebook back in my pocket. Steve says, “You know lesser sounds that aren’t supposed to be there? That raises my hackles.”

“Your hackles?” I cackle, and fish the notebook right back out.

“Hackles, that’s the hair on the back of your neck. That’s what dogs have. That’s hackles - I think - that’s the way I’ve always used the word.”

We walk past a stand of that tall bamboo-like grass. “You should stand behind there and show me your boobs,” he says. “I’ll take some pictures and put them on the blog. It’d be tit-illating.”

“I think it’d raise their hackles,” I scoff.

“No… their woodies!” he exclaims. “Not their hackles!”

“You know, I love listening to you. I’m glad we’re doing this. I don’t think you know how interesting you are.”

“I’m not particularly interesting. It’s good practice for you to get conversation for writing.”

“No,” I say. “Don’t discount yourself. Most people don’t have a shit of wit of what to say.”

“You calling me a shit wit? Well, Louis Armstrong discounted himself,” Steve says. “Louis Armstrong, according to the critics, he’s the most important person in Jazz. Three or four of the main components of Jazz come from him.”

“And yet in a concert near the end of his life, one of his players messed up. Armstrong lost his temper with him afterwards. He said, Don’t mess with my con. Cuz he thought his music was just his con for getting by in the white man’s world.”

“So one of the greatest Jazz musicians — ever — thought of his music as a scam. I don’t worry about not being famous anymore. People like Orson Welles showed me that talent is not always rewarded.”

We pass a stinking shit pile and two sewage pools. We’re moving up the road, over a hill past the many vineyards, to a plateau which has many more vineyards.

“You know what the corporations do?” Steve asks.

“Hmm?”

“When baby formula passes the expiration sell date, they donate it to the African poor. They write off the full cost on their taxes. So they’re killing babies for money. That reminds me of The Third Man. Orson Welles played a bad guy. They turned the audience against him by having him sell bad penicillin to sick baby orphans. And that’s what corporations are doing now. They’re the Harry Lime of The Third Man.”

“Orson Welles sunk too low in the movie. He was going to kill his friend, but decided against it. Because too many people already knew his crimes. It wouldn’t do any good to push him off the Ferris wheel.”

“Sounds like Karl Rove,” I say. “Karl Rove has everything reduced to the evil-ist level.”

“Yeah, but Karl Rove has no cool. Orson Welles stayed cool even after he got fat. Karl’s just a fat fucking pig.”

“One time Orson Wells was on the Tonight Show, and Robert Blake ribbed him, “Why don’t you lose some weight?’ Orson Wells said, ‘Did you know that at this stage of my life losing weight can be fatal? Unlike you, sir. It’s not too late now for you to learn some manners.”

We pass a burned vineyard. Steve starts sniffing. “The allergens are increasing because of global warming.”

“You could be reacting to the smoke,” I say. “Smoke bothers you. They burned this field.”

“Still, you gotta mention all this in your sci-fi story. The fact that poison ivy is getting deadlier. That allergies in the spring and fall are getting worse. The more toxins we put in the air, the more beautiful the sun rise and sun sets are. Man’s last sunset is going to be fucking gorgeous.”

“You know, and other major symptoms of this planetary calamity. Ninety percent of the large fish are just gone. Eaten. And lots of small fish, entire species, gone. But what really scares me is the acidity change in the oceans. That could really fuck us up fast.”

“I know. That’s what why we’re having fish for dinner,” I say.

“And no one really cares,” Steve continues. “I’m a kind of wild man. I read everything, even the backs of cereal boxes. I don’t think anyone really ties it all together.”

“I think the scientists care,” I say. “They’ve been pretty vocal.”

I’ve been thinking lately that I don’t know if there’s a sci-fi story I can write that is more horrifying than what’s happening to the planet. It’s even more horrifying than an alien invasion. I think it’s more terrifying because it’s all our fault, and it’s all preventable.

I absentmindedly watch Steve take a piss by the side of the road. I look around at the greening trees. There’s a particularly bright flowered tree, an almond tree, in front of me. I think about taking its picture. Bees hum around its little body and there are still last year’s almonds hanging off of it. It’s really really hot outside now. There’s a cactus plant and other variegated vegetation near the almond tree.

“I could see this area becoming a desert,” I say.

Steve shakes the last urine out of his penis, spritzing the red earth. He says, “They say halfway up Europe will become desert with just one more degree temperature raise. Great Britain will be OK, though. It’ll be one of the last places.”

Referring to his penis, I say, “I’d like one of those. It’d be convenient. I like yours. It’s attractive.”

“I could see you having fun with one,” he says. “You could take it out in the snow.” He swirls his finger around. “Write your name on it: Kaaathy.”

I point the almond tree out to Steve. “Their hard little hearts must need a long time to grow. Maybe that’s why they come out first. They need to be fertilized first.”

“Look at all the flowers there. Must take a lotta bees.”

“There’s a hawk up there,” Steve continues. He watches the bird a bit. “I think there’s a little bird following it.”

I look back out over the fields. The hawk’s hovering in blue sky, over the sewage settling ponds and the field of burning compost. An overgrown cactus is growing by the compost. It looks like a gigantic aloe plant, something from the movie Night of the Iguana.

“I think they’re on the same air current. Kinda like us,” I suggest. “They’re on the same wavelength.”

“Wait a minute; it just dropped something. It’s following it! It’s falling.”

“Maybe it’s training the little bird,” I finish.

passed the feces processing pools on our walk today. the compost on the north side was smoldering. made me think of hell, or venus, or our congress in washington d.c. (anything spineless, greedy, evil - or any big pile of waste - makes me think of congress, of both the demoscaredycats and the republicscams).

kathy combined my two fotos of the burning bundles into the one foto above.

took forever to complete our walk because she writes everything we did and said down in her notepad. she’s writing more and longer blogs now, so i can squeak by with less. let her tote the text.

“Read this article this morning,” Steve says. “The reporter’s lamenting: Why isn’t anybody paying attention to Seymour Hersh, to what he’s writing about Iran?”

“Well the Democrats are in on it too,” I say.

“But he’s saying why isn’t anybody anywhere paying attention to Seymour Hersh. Oh well. They’re doing us a favor because we won’t have to worry about housing anymore. There’s gonna be a fucking nuclear war. There won’t be any housing.”

He crunches and slurps some Special K, then adds, “and he says that some of the 8 billion dollars that is missing in Iraq was taken by the Vice President to run his operation.”

Steve notices me scribbling notes for my journal. “Oh, you’re writing this down. I’ll have to watch what I say.”

“Oh, yeah, right,” I scoff. Steve’s not one to be careful.

I’m trying to get the ebb and flow of conversation down. I’m practicing writing realistic dialogue for the sci-fi novel I’d like to write.

Steve groans out of his seat. He pads to the sink to deposit his wet cereal bowl, says, “I want to get some more fake butter at the store today.”

“You have to be careful about that stuff. You really spread that on. It’s not totally heart-safe, you know.” Steve has high cholesterol. We get “safer” butter but I’m rather dubious about it.

“We don’t have to worry about that sort of thing. We’re not going to live long enough. You know what’s interesting, don’t you?”

“Hmm?”

“In the 50s and 60s we were interested in atomic warfare, then we got interested in all this other shit: disease, global warming. Now we’re back to atomic warfare again.”

–

In the afternoon, I wander outside with Steve. I peer over our rented balcony. The purple mountains are in the distance, past wintering vineyards. The landscape is mottled pastel tone, a mixture of warm and cool colors. The sky is bright blue. The sun on the patio plays shades of bone, yellow, blue shadow.

Our blue and white comforter hangs over Steve’s arms. He’s bringing it down to the line to freshen it with air.

I interrupt his descent. “I wonder if we should buy our own sheets before we go to Morocco. Bring them in our packs. We should hang our sheets there to make them safer. I’ve been reading about scabies and things like that.”

“Hmm… the Ibis would be ok wouldn’t it?” We booked two nights there so we have a chance to look around for an apartment.

“Well, probably.”

“It makes you wonder why we’re going!”

He pads down the stairs into our cheerful back yard. The neighboring yards have palm trees and various manicured fruit trees. Yesterday the neighbors unwrapped orange trees on their balcony.

I go back into our cool tiled hall. The tile looks like it could have come from North Africa. I love it.

I don’t like to have to plan for these things. The weight of carrying the sheets in our packs would be oppressive. And worry is oppressive. I think we’re going because we want to find out this stuff for ourselves. Every place has been much safer than we’ve expected so far. So what if we get scabies. It’s easily treated. Every new place is a revelation, and I expect even more from North Africa. I want to be somewhere even more exotic than the south of France.

i walk out the back door, look out over the valley vineyards to the foothills 20 kilometers away, then on to the Pyrenees mountains beyond and the clouds above tying it all together. the foothills, mountains, clouds all seem enigmatic varying blue-grey slabs of the same stuff, faraway stuff, unreachable stuff, story book fairy tale stuff. yet i’ve flown through clouds, and i’ve walked in the Bitterroot mountains where i was born - so fairy tales and dreams can be reached.

i walk down the crooked concrete stairs to our irregular backyard off to the side, passing over our neighbor’s roof, and hang our bed clothes on the line to air. i stand awhile looking at the palm trees, almond trees, listening to the bees fertilize the white blossoms above. i stand in a gentle rain of white petals the bees knock from the flowers in their honey lust. the sun bathes my upturned face.

dogs bark out front in our 4 door lane. we ride our bikes to the next village for fish and yogurt. i’m wearing my t-shirt, yet it’s the ides of march - months away from such sun were i still in cleveland ohio. the trees here are blooming, the flowers never went away.

i think how much the sun charges my soul, invigorates my spirit, soothes my id, mellows my ego, lazes my ambition. the people here are the friendliest i’ve encountered - even the children say bon jour when we pass. i think it’s due to the almost daily sun, coupled with the ease of life in small hill-top villages. were we up north in big city paris, life would likely be faster, meaner.

sunshine changes me immediately, so must have affected the path of civilization here in the mediterranean. i’m wondering what will happen in morocco, where it is 10-20 degrees warmer. i suspect too much warm would affect civilization as adversely as too much cool.

me, i’m cool cat copasetic in absolute time.

tonight we’ll burn a big pile of branches in the back yard. when our host asked if i’d burn it, i said “is that legal?”. i’m too used to the controlled repressed regulated mentality of the united states where everything is regimented. things are freer over here. you’d think this being an older more ancient culture, things would be more set - but it’s the young u.s.a. that tries to control, while this old laid back culture allows free flow.

We’re in the town center, in front of the grocer. “Look at that old cat,” says Steve.

“I would love to be that cat. He’s got the sun, it’s not too cold. He can walk around if he wants. He’s fed.” I envy the cat’s life.

“He’s an old cat. He’s not there half the time. He just sits there, sorta like this meditative daze,” Steve says.

We settle on a bench in the sun. We’re in front of the bar, in a big courtyard. The grocery and bakery across the street are closed. The cat’s asleep. Cigarette smoke wafts out of the bar.

“That smoke’s invidious,” Steve says.

“Is that a word? Do you mean insidious?”

“I don’t know. I think it means invasive,” he replies.

“I like the word winnow,” I say. “I don’t know where I learned that word, but I used it the other day. I didn’t even know if it was a real word. I had to check the dictionary.”

“Ah, winnow the minnow.”

I ponder minnow and winnow. The association immediately comes to my mind as well. Minnows are slippery, little glinty things. They winnow around. You can see them gradually as your perception winnows the water.

The air smells like water. The town just turned on the water fountain today. It’s a couple feet to our right.

“That sound definitely wasn’t here before,” Steve notices. “I’m partial to the sound of running water.”

The grocery store cat used to lie by it, lap from it. But now it’s too boisterously noisy for the cat. Weird how air can smell like water. I know it’s not really a smell, but the moisture I pick up. Or I could smell some mineral which is being excited into the spray.

I wonder about the English language. I know all these words, but I don’t know where they came from, where I first heard them. French is so similar to English because English inherited many words from French due to the intertwined history of the countries. But even though I can divine meaning of written French, this doesn’t transfer into listening skills. It’s as though every single word seems recognizable, but obscure, and it’s all strung together at once, and it’s in a French accent.

A young man walks by. He has an oval bread loaf wrapped in his arms. His legs are banded with fluorescent orange stripes. He appears to be some type of utility worker. “That’s quite a fashion statement,” says Steve.

“How does he eat that bread?” I wonder. “Does he tear chunks of it? Does he make sandwiches? Does he slice it? That’s one thing we don’t get to see here.”

“I don’t know,” says Steve. “We could sneak into their apartments and install cameras.”

I think about pizza, which is behind us, next to the bar.

“What time is it?”

Steve doesn’t answer. He pulls his face close to mine. It’s our code for “time for a kiss.” I peck him. Then he says, “1:15.”

I rest my head on his lap, lay my back on the bench.

“There you go,” he says. He puts his hand on my breast. “I’ll hold your boobs for you.”

“Oh, thank you.”

“I won’t even charge you.”

I fiddle with my arm, pulling the skin taught, letting it snap back. The sun on my arm shows dry, freckled skin. It’s thinnish and attractive to me. I remember how fat my arm used to be. I play with the ridges of the veins.

“This is my arm,” I inform Steve.

“Are you sure?”

“No, I’m not.”

He says, “If this were a Philip K. Dick novel, we couldn’t be sure of anything.”

“Let’s go to the cemetery.”

“We’re headed there anyway, aren’t we?” He starts up. “I can’t believe what a thin wisp of cloud makes, what a difference. It just went away, and now it got hotter here.”

we view this shaded present through rumors of the past, today’s ides of march through eyes pre-marched, re-marched, remarked. our nature’s denatured by nurture, our now now known by then. we never see new, merely anew. this present is a collaboration between now and then collage of thens to now - with the future but rewoven pasts of other’s threads, dreads, spreads, unmade beds.

i would not be my me now without all my me’s thens - and each me’s then is built from other thens, movies, musics, books, customs, beliefs, religions, relations. i merely taste, test, juggle, struggle, select, reject other was into my customized code of is. one size does not fit all, but all sizes seized for one.

this ooze goes back to basics with our original genetic hard wiring - the low limbic flight or fight, the flee or flow, the fondness for female flesh - messages passed down via collective unconscious, racial memory. we suckle historic mammary of mute and mutant mummy.

[ though not his fault, that was sparked by a sentence of Camus' - "The cities that Europe can offer are too full of rumours from the past" - from "Minotaur or the Halt at Oran" (1939) ]

one nice thing about moving on to morocco is i’ll get my wife back - here, i’ve lost her to the internet. 1st 2 weeks in england we had twice a week internet access, followed by 3 weeks of 24/7 wireless in london. then a week of using cyber cafes in amsterdam followed by 7 weeks of 24/7 in krakow poland. next 3 months it was take a 30 minute bus to town twice a week for library internet. here she gets up before me. when i arise, i come out and see she has her pc parasite on her lap. she takes it off to make me coffee, to shower, to feed me, to go for a walk, to watch a movie or the daily show, and to go to bed - all other times they’re online together, she and her cyber lap cat.

she has done a lot of work, what with her myspace place and pbase space - she even has 2 videos up. i’ll do a brag blog with links just before we leave of all we’ve gotten online since fleeing the states. it has been a mightily productive time for us creatively. probably emotionally too.

We walk to the doctor, who is rumored to be past the post office. It’s a school day. I find a piece of paper by the recycle bins. It’s for kids. It’s about the letter “Q”, and there are words like quelle and quatre and pictures of things which begin in Q.

I tell Steve, “Look. This would be nice for you, for collage. Why don’t you take this home?”

Steve doesn’t show any interest, but I’m persistent. “Look, it’s ‘Q’ for “Q-llage. Get it? Co-llage.” I have an impulse to throw the trash back down on the ground so that other theoretical garbage artists can get it. I know this is crazy, so I put it away properly, in a trash can.

“OK. I know. It was a silly pun.”

“Yeah, but you can get away with bad puns,” Steve says. “Puns have a sense of style and class. Poor style, and low class, but that’s alright.”

We walk past the post office. We don’t see anything that looks like a doctor’s office. We peer at everyone’s door for anything medical looking. At the end of the street, a sign — medecin — points back to where we’ve just been.

“Well, she said it was past the office,” I say. “Maybe it’s around back?” We don’t think so, but we check out back and just find a vacant dirt yard. But the windows in the back reveal an exercise bike and something that could be a cot.

We find the doctor’s office in an obscure area of the post office entrance, but it’s closed. I go into the post office and ask when the doctor’s is open. I’m informed that for a rendez-vous with the medecin, I need to telephonez.

I’m satisfied with my French communications, and we set on our way back home. “Oh, I should have asked about boxes,” I lament to Steve. Learning how to ship from a new country is taxing. I squint and frown into the noon sun.

“Who knows what customs will do to us,” he groans. We hate to mail anything.

We’re back at the place next to the recycling bins where we found the “Q” paper. “Oh, look. A triptych!” Steve points at the walk. A dog left three enormous shits. I giggle.

“That’d be a good metaphor,” he says. “One of my problems is I need metaphors to work with. We need to go to a flea market to find some metaphors.”

A small pickup passes. Steve says, “I’d like one of those. Big enough for the two of us in the front, and a large cat in the back.”

“A large cat? Why a large cat?” I ask. Steve always slips absurd Easter eggs into our conversation.

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe a little lion or something like that. It just sounds good.” He bades me to stand still, unzips my backpack. Stuffs his sweater into it while humming “do do, do do, do do” under his breath.

“I’m gonna turn you into a pack wife,” he says. “That’s a pretty good pack there actually.” He turns his hanky out of pocket, wipes his glasses quickly. Then blows his nose with the hanky.

in my long battle of what should be in life versus what is, i’ve always wondered why as crazy as i am, i wasn’t crazy - why am i the sanest life form around. now, thanks to freud, i know - my art, my poetry, and my imagination have kept me sane:

“If a person who is at loggerheads with reality possesses an artistic gift (a thing that is still a psychological mystery to us), he can transform his phantasies into artistic creations instead of into symptoms, In this manner he can escape the doom of neurosis and by this roundabout path regain his contact with reality.”

freud continues, “If there is persistent rebellion against the real world and if this precious gift is absent or insufficient, it is almost inevitable that the libido, keeping to the sources of the phantasies, will follow the path of regression, and will revive infantile wishes and end in neurosis. Today neurosis takes the place of the monasteries which used to be the refuge of all whom life had disappointed or felt too weak to face it.”

from the “five lectures on psycho-analysis” sigmund freud gave at clark university, worcester, massachusetts, september 1909.

so, art may not have brought me fame & fortune, but it has given me a full life full of interesting folk, and has kept me sane. let’s hear it for art.

in a pre-comment to today’s blog, writer/poet/photographer Miles Budimir quoted Freud quoting Goethe who said “A man who has both science and art also has religion. If anyone does not possess these two then let him have religion.” Miles put it more interestingly:

He who has science and has art
religion, too, has he;
who has not science, has not art
let him religious be.

from freud to philip k dick - a man so weird, he makes me look tame. freud would have loved to psychoanalize dick. just finished reading dick’s sci/fi novel Ubik. one of the oddest books i’ve come across. 20 pages from the end i still didn’t know where it would go. i love books and movies that operate outside the parameters of my expectations, make my brain jump. some other great philip k dick novels are VALIS… Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (from which they made the movie Blade Runner)… my all time favorite book title - Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said… and the best drug novel i’ve read, A Scanner Darkly.

dick did more drugs than any writer i know of - probably even me. he loved LSD. he also helped the black panthers run guns. the man lived his life and beliefs. he had either a nervous breakdown or a revelation in 1974 when he began receiving transmissions from god or a distant star or an orbiting satellite. one of these revelations saved his son’s life. the entity told dick his son was dying. dick rushed him to the doctor who discovered it was true and saved him. this became the autobiographical novel VALIS.

besides Blade Runner, 7 films have been made from dick stories: Total Recall, Minority Report, Screamers, Imposter, Paycheck, A Scanner Darkly, and Confessions of a Crap Artist. a film adaptation of the short story The Golden Man will be released April 27, 2007, starring Nicolas Cage and Julianne Moore.

VALIS was turned into an opera in 1987 while Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said was staged by the New York-based avante-garde company Mabou Mines in 1988.

in 1963, he won the Hugo Best Novel award for The Man in the High Castle. in 1975 he won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel for Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said. he was nominated for 2 more Hugos and 5 Nebula Awards.

one of my few sorrows at selling / giving away all my possessions so kathy and i could roam the world was getting rid of my 40+ philip k dick books i’d slowly collected. it’s hard to find his books in america - he didn’t start to be recognized in the states until he died in 1982, just a few months before Blade Runner came out - altho those like myself who were on the edge thought he was the best there was, a judgment the french hold as well. i kept making jokes about my dick book collection.

more philip k dick data at
Philip K Dick Wikipedia
and
Philip K Dick official site

I thank Steve. We’re up. We’re walking to the next town before dawn because of my fancy to see the night sky turn to dawn.

“No need to thank,” he says. “Ain’t no free free.”

“But there’s free for me,” I reply.

He wags his finger. “No, I been keeping score. There’s gonna be a big bill and more.”

“I know,” I say. “But it’s worth it. I wasn’t happy before this. I didn’t know this possible, that you were possible. It’s better than anything I’ve dreamed.”

The skies are orange in the hill towns. We walk to the edge of town. There’s sudden thick black past the scoop of street light. The road and the sky are cut off by velvet dark curtain. We walk into the dark, then pause. I look back at our orange lit town. It seems mean–unappealing–now that it’s only colored in orange.

Then I peer around into the thinning dark. I’m on the road in front of a farm. There are outlines of grape vine posts, the farm yard. The roof of the stone farm building stands out in relief, spanish tile ridges against purple sky. Over the tiles, a crescent moon, and Venus. And up above, the darker sky, outer space, the big dipper.

“Oh yes, the Dipper does pour North.” Steve checks his compass. I think, how simple it could be to really know the sky, to navigate by stars. I think about how the sun is just really a nearby star, but how special it is because of its proximity. Simple and amazing.

“I need to learn this stuff,” I say. “One of the things I’ve always wanted to do is to know the night sky. Now we have time.” We make plans to learn more about stars.

Already the rooster’s call scratches, needles the night sky. And we are sombre walking into the next town. Steve takes a cold piss up against a telephone pole. A dog barks lazily at us.

In the town, we sit in the church yard under the tower with its anachronistic modern clock which whizzes every minute by.

The trees are espaliered in the yard across the street. The elegant branches sprout straight up from horizontal base limbs, and then truncate in even fringe against the sky. Even trees which don’t bear fruit are cut to sometimes bizarre effect. The entire land is cultivated, groomed. “This whole land is espaliered,” I tell Steve. “The French know how to make everything fruit.”

I watch some nearby grasses sway. We spend some minutes in silence. A small shadow is tentative around a corner. A cat emerges, but creeps back when she discovers us.

The road back. More birds cry at the bluing sky and the town is sunk in their bustle. The noise is a shading, an isolation from the next town. Otherwise the more silent air seems emptier, less of an obstruction, thin. But now everything chitters and shakes.

We’re on the edge of town, which is all new construction. New construction is isolated. Big yards, big houses.

“Why do people move to a town like this and then build these houses?” I ask Steve. “Isn’t the purpose of living here to live in a small community? Why don’t they build town houses?”

I think about all the money those people make to keep and fill their property with beautiful things.

“Well most people want new and big and modern,” Steve says. “They don’t care about character.”

“What a waste of resources,” I reply. I wonder if any of those big house people actually have time to enjoy their materialistic wealth, or if they have to work constantly.

On the road back Venus is still visible. We hear chirps. Steve asks, “Is that a frog?”

“I don’t know.” I cannot differentiate the sound of insect, frog or bird. I don’t know nature.

“Where do the frogs go at night? Or in the winter?” I ask.

“Under the mud,” Steve answers. “They go under the water, under the mud, under the ice.”

I think about the little lizards we’ve seen here in France. It seems they are solar powered. They come out in afternoon sun, lizard drops on the stone or concrete walls. The cool lake of our shadows gives them notice of us, and they trickle when touched by the shadow like a stream of mercury. Or like how water becomes heavy and quick, spills itself out of its position when touched by other water. I imagine the little lizards cold in the blue night, in a crack in the wall, or in a little nest, gravelled under ground.

watched the most disturbing film i’ve yet seen - and since i’ve 4,552 films in my collection - many of them exceedingly odd and disturbing - that’s saying something. El Maquinista (2004) aka The Machinist staring Christian Bale, directed by Brad Anderson. as somebody said, it out Lynches David Lynch. a story of guilt. never ever want to see it again, but i’m glad i saw it once. impressed the heck out of me. i have a 2001 horror film by the same director called Session 9 which did not impress me - cannot understand how he jumped from so-so to genius in 3 years. Christian Bale should have gotten an academy award for this role - he lost 63 pounds for the film and looks like a concentration camp survivor.

Christian Bale is on my short list of actors i’ll watch anything they’re in. Harvey Keital is another. as is Jack Nicholson. Denzel Washington is also a pleasure, especially when he’s nasty. and Julianne Moore both nasty and nice.

continuing with culture, finished reading Shakespeare’s The Tempest. much better than As You Like It. but when you get down to the nitty gritty, it’s a bunch of excellent writing around shallow plot, situation comedy synchronicities, and no character development at all. outside of the pleasure of the words, there’s nothing there. so far the only 2 of his plays i respect and can dig my psyche into are Hamlet and Macbeth. if anyone can suggest others, let me know. Hamlet is pure genius.

also read Stephen King’s horror Cell - he’s done much better. and David Brin’s sci/fi Kil’n People - he’s also done much better. they’re both killing time books.

we also watched Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) and Citizen Kane (1941) - both excellent films, but they work best only upon first viewing - this is my 4th or 5th time for each, and they do not hold up well.

Brazil (1985) on the other hand impressed me yet again. as did Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (1968). It Happened One Night (1934) is still a lot of fun - it was the first of two films to win the top 5 academy awards (actress, actor, film, director, writing). the other film to do that was One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.