Trail Of Tears

I was lost. How could I not know where I was? I grew up there. I walked the entire territory so many times I lost track of how many. Yet there I was at the stop sign wondering which way I should turn, the impatient line of SUV's on my tail began to nudge me forward as I let three openings slip on by, so I took the fourth, and hoped that I wasn't embarrassing myself. There were apartments and condo's piled high on both sides with an eclectic North County feel. A eucalyptus here, an orange tree there. That whole hill was a dark green dream thickly dotted bright orange when last I was there. The selective few that remained in the tiny landscapes were the only clues I had to where I was heading. I thought to myself, they should rename this place, it's not the hidden valley anymore. Everybody knows about it and built condo's here.

The road signs declared my memory all lies. I didn't like that place. I drove along heading North-East. Hopefully there would be a fruit stand left somewhere in the valley. Where was all the fruit? The picture I painted for John was filled with orchards, fruit stands and speckled with livestock. All we were seeing was stucco walls grasping at the sky with greedy fingers, asphalt and pavement covered every inch of the soil and clay that used to stain my shoes, and my home place was neglected and over grown. A posh slum.

I commented on how many silly status seekers were driving SUV's in a place where four-wheel-drive would never be engaged. I was hysterical inside and the veneer was cracking.
I burst out laughing at myself and my companion, already confused, asked, What's so funny?

None of this. All of this. I don't know...yes I do. I was thinking about how ridiculous it was for me to rent an SUV to come here, and how absurd these people that own them are. There's no off-road left!

I sensed the pang of sympathy emanating from him. There was concern as well. He probably thought I was losing my mind. I felt like I was, and decided there was no point in pretending I knew where I was.

I don't believe it, but truth is...I'm lost. I couldn't quit laughing. I mean, where the hell am I anyways? I should know, but I don't. All this is new...everything!

Next day we headed up the mountain. I didn't think there would be any congestion up there. It was all Reservation and U.S. Forestry land. We hit Valley Center and turned towards Bates Brothers Nut Farm. A few curves and I was flabbergasted.
A casino? Since when?

That clenched it. Everything I ever knew only lived inside the faded memories I kept in a cigar box.

When I die, Escondido and all of North County dies with me.

I was talking to myself.

Not this stuff, but the real one. I feel so obsolete.

We spent the afternoon at a casino my college friend frequented. We had an exquisite meal and lost some money while we waited for her addiction to release her. We were so glad when we finally got out of there. I raced back to the nut farm. The one place that hadn't cheated me. We bought some fried peas and jalapeno jelly and I got to reminisce for a second or two, remembering my little girls posing in front of the straw bales and petting zoo. After that we completed the day by winding our way up Palomar Mountain where I slipped out of the drivers seat and up the mountain side in search of some old off-season dried up mistletoe. Hoping I'd find something to bring back with me, anything really. I fought the urge to just keep hiking up the slope and never go back. The thin air cleared my head. I wanted to run away from the present. That would have meant leaving John behind though, so I decided to release the past and be thankful for what I have and that I didn't stay here to see the city encroach and devour the land.

That vacation became my own personal trail of tears, but I wasn't gonna let it show.
I returned to my friends with a smile, mumbling,

New beginnings, there are always new beginnings.
6/28/2005 1:35 PM
word count 743

Laconic Psychiatric Masturbation

When the sight of a kind act reduces me to tears, I think firstly, what a terrible world this must be. Secondly, I ask myself, Did I take my Premarin today? Some people like to blame the mascara melt down on hormones every time. I think they just like the way hormones, if said properly, can insinuate a tawdry tryst. It feels good rolling around in their mouth in a laconic psychiatric masturbation.

Being a woman, I know that the Revlon rupture can sometimes be entirely linked to an irregular glandular secretion; one of Mother Natures random acts of violence. Keeps men on their toes. Those that dare run the gauntlet and succeed in calming a woman on a premenstrual Jones without using the H word will bring home the gold in the sexual scrimmage for verbal dexterity. The rewards endless.

I find the overuse of the word red flags a sub-normality that is positively bovine. Anyone deriving too much pleasure from the hormonal lampoon has libidinous tunnel vision.I really don’t see why some find it so socially unacceptable for a man to show emotion. I like to categorize my pedantic little world and I have assigned three categories to the male stand on sentiment , the automaton, that’s the guy that has no emotions (love and remorse included), and there’s the social climber, he has them, only he doesn’t want anyone to find out (insecure waste of time) and my Adonis, the I am man (he simply is, moment to moment reacting naturally without fear).

Granted, that women and men of leftist sexual orientation are more likely to be unconcerned with others witnessing their enraptured compassion, but there are still those intensely hot I am men out there too.

When I was a child I believed that people cried for one of four reasons; pain, fright, loss and manipulation. Things got a little more complicated as I got older. The theoretical root stayed the same, only I began to figure in contributing factors, demographics, religion, geography, political party and anything else to cloud the results and confuse the shit out of myself. It only took my four year old grandson fifteen seconds to clear the fog.

I smashed my finger in the door and bit back the verbalizations I usually employ in such a situation. My teeth clenched and my eyes reached saturation point as I squeezed the distraught digit. He asked me if I was going to cry. Then he asked me if I was pretending , lost my finger, hurt it, or if I was scared. I told him it hurt, I was scared for a minute but I didn’t lose it so I’ll be okay.

Then he said, Good ‘cause if yer pertendin’ momma won’t fink it’s funny!

Do you believe in coincidences? I don’t. My mother has told me that things happen for a reason. We don’t always find out why they happen. If you’re lucky the reason will be revealed before you completely forget about it. So I guess I smashed my finger so that the logical simplicity of life could be returned to me before I got so engrossed in dissecting answers that I would forget the question.

That question being…Did I take my Premarin today?

6/26/2005 2:41 AM

Word count 564

USS Oriskany; Another Brush With Death

Although my father has been gone now 9 years, this Fathers Day was a very special one. Dad was a Navy man. He served on the USS Oriskany. I remember he was on the ship when it came limping in after a fire on the hanger deck had claimed 45 lives and a chunk of the hull. That was Viet Nam. It took out the organ he used to pass away free time playing. I especially remember that because of my mothers state at the time. When she found out he was okay the world was lifted from where it squatted on her head. I was small then and didn't understand a lot but words like fire, death and war, were all part of my single syllable vocabulary.

After all these years, the Oriskany has been surfacing everywhere. Which is ironic seein's how it was scheduled to be sunk to serve as an artificial reef. The sinking has been postponed thankfully. I'm just not ready to see the ship go down.

I noticed it in an old movie, Mom found Oriskany postcards, my sister had lunch with a man that served on it in the 50's, I watched a special on the naval ghost ship yards and I ran across a few of dads old Navy things in my treasure drawer , formerly known as the junk drawer. I think everyone should rethink the whole junk drawer phenomenon. If the stuff you put in that drawer was just junk it would have landed in the kitchen can instead. Therefore those items are of greater value to the individual that was compelled to stash them in that aggravatingly unorganized safe haven for uncategorized treasures. Face it, hell hath no fury like the pack-rat that feels he's been violated.

I've been feeling an overwhelming urge to dig up what I can. I was going to say it all started when my mother emailed me a picture of me and little brother meeting Dad at the docks, but it didn't. It started before then. I've been rummaging for a while now. Looking for things, browsing histories and doing a lot of Sherlock Holmes-ing. That's nothing like Jone's-ing. I managed to find some long lost people, made some connections. I found out that there is a book out there about the fire in the hanger during the Viet Nam War and a video of the tragedy. I know my dad was on the ship, so my sister is anxious to purchase them and see if she can find a small glimpse of a man we both miss a great deal, still living and breathing, even if it's only on tape or in the memory of the writer. There are several websites and one dedicated to the Oriskany museum and the ships alumni. So if you or a family member served on the ship during any of the actions, please visit www.ussoriskany.com and make some connections of your own, after all, the ship won't be afloat forever. In fact they'll tell you when they plan on sinking her next. And they say cats have nine lives!
6/22/2005 2:21 AM
word count 538

My brother and I with Dad in front of the USS Oriskany

Look Toto, We're Not In Kansas Anymore!

People come and people go
in the never ending ebb and flow
of life.

Tomorrow is Johns annual family reunion here in Nevada. It used to be held at his sweet mothers in Lamar, but she's been gone a few years now. So the siblings are taking turns at hosting the modest shin-dig. Even that generation is thinning.

What happens when all the older folks pass on? The younger generations are so full of Me-me's and tomorrows that never come, so who's going to care enough to keep the family together? I don't have the answer. My family all, are an independent lot, that spread their wings and let the wind carry them to destinations unknown. The lure of discovery proves too tempting to us seekers. Like Power Ball, you lay down your dollar and take your chances although that multi-million dollar pot is what initially caught your attention, you just hope that you'll at least break even, . My Power Ball jack pot, the treasure I was seeking in my wanderings, wasn't full of dollar signs; it was the green-green grass of a home I hoped to find; somewhere that water rationing and wild fires don't exist; where flowers grow wild and my brown thumb would turn to green; where there are four seasons in equal proportion and where a person of any working class can still buy a home or start a business without a Faustian deal.

That's Missouri in 60 words or less.

I found my Eden, albeit has it's flaws. Like those little nuisances called tornados, twisters, funnel clouds, or since we're just East of the Kansas line I like to call them Look-Toto-we're-not-in-Kansas-anymore ! I know it's a little windy but all the other good names were already taken.
Micro-bursts are another neat little thing I've learnt about since moving here. In fact, I'd never heard of them before...like EVER, until a couple tractor barns got flattened and then sucked up into the clouds and then slammed back down, spitting distance from our newly purchased farm. They don't tear through the countryside ripping grass up by the roots, displacing fish ponds and parking school buses in tree tops, as if gored by a gentleman cow. They just drop down and then shoot back up. Done.Committing a nuisance on the unsuspecting. I had a hard time grasping the whole theory as presented by our meteorologists until I had pulled the winning ticket in a who-does-the-micro-burst-get-to-mess-with-next raffle. I'm just glad that raffle was free 'cause the winner is the loser.

We had a volatile storm season that year. There were hundreds of tornados, we even got nicked by a look-Toto---------, narrowly escaping total destruction. I did however manage to be center stage when a Micro-burst slammed down, flattening my new green house and then ripping it upward scattering my potted plants over the entire north lawn. There I was scarmblin' round on my knees stuffing handful's of mud and uprooted green children into whatever I could find. The rain was so heavy I felt like I might as well be trying to catch fish at the very bottom of Niagra Falls; hopeless and suicidal. I just couldn't turn my back on those emergent, violated plants weeping and laid bare.

I guess that people that grow up in a place like this are much more aware of their mortality. The impending doom that could drop out of the sky without warning, that could take everything and everyone from them like an atomic bomb, is ever present. Even the kiss of an afternoon breeze, soft and caressing, whispers warnings to those who'll listen. Perhaps that's why they place such great importance on the annual Chicken Annies buffet. For those of us that have managed to stay out of mother natures way during her...cycle, the reality of our transience doesn't carry the same impact. We know we won't live forever, but are convinced that we will only go when we are good and ready, thinking we'll have a lifetime to play catch up if we let a few people slip by the wayside.

I've been to enough funerals in the last eight years to question my own life expectancy and I have tried to make more of the time I have at hand rather than planning it for a later date. So basically I'm saying that I'm thankful for the trip we took last month that brought me a little closer to my family for a few days and I plan to plan more plans that won't get lost in the planning for plannings sake and need years to fully cycle. My plans are of action these days because, after all...we don't live forever..
6/19/2005 0:45 AM
word count 791

Rust Water on Canvas

Today was one of those days. You know the type; the odds could totally be in your favor, everything you do, you do right, and yet, fate finds a way to drop tootsie rolls in your path. I’m not talking about the chewy center of a tootsie pop, I’m talkin’ about the kind that can clear a public pool in nano-seconds when found bobbing along suspiciously amongst children of all ages. That’s how today went for me. It was full of chewy chocolate looking rolls with a not so sweet smell. Poopy cakes. I stepped in two before breakfast.

After brunch the Takamine guitar of my dreams, the F400S that I had purchased after years of searching came UPS today. I was so happy I could have died right then, even though my two favorite pairs of slippers were smeared with animal excrement and tossed in the can. When I opened it up my heart did a flip-flop. Somehow during shipping they managed to skewer the hard wood case and the work of art inside in three places. Completely destroying my coveted masterpiece.

Then there was the nifty rusty harness pieces a friend had found for me. She knew I’d been looking for some and found me a nice pair. In my excitement I picked them up spraying my new white canvas shoes and jogging wear with rust water that drained freely from the other end. My frugal mind thought I’d be doing my thoughtful friend a favor by emptying the rest of the brown fluid into her strawberry bed. Why waste water? So I dumped…until I realized it was just spraying the whole bed with a rancid burnt sienna wash.

Moving on to my daughter’s house I quickly came down with a reaction not unlike an intestinal flu. Not a good day to stay for dinner.

I made a hasty exit and half way home realized I’d left my glasses behind. I went to use my cell phone to call her so she could make sure and keep her children from getting a hold of them. I was roaming…among other problems. I’ll spare you the entire entourage of misfortunes.
So you see, after 24 hours like that, I am ready to turn out the light and pretend that none of it ever happened. Unfortunately I won’t be getting much sleep on account of a horribly itchy rash developing in my cleavage and crawling up my chest.
6/17/2005 0:13 AM
word count 430

Remember The Turtle

I've been sticking my neck out for a long time on and off, looking for people that have been long lost to me. I'm much like a turtle encased in it's own naturally occuring fall-out shelter that it carries around on it's back, such is the life of a person born under the sign of the crab. If you ask me, it should've been a turtle. I make slow steady progress in my fearful manner as I blunder through. I tend to withdraw from intimacy by baracading myself within...and I eat a lot of lettuce.

I suppose in my thinking, it's because people that have passed on to the next level of consciousness have found a way to stay in contact with me in my earthly existence, so how hard can it be to find people on the same plain? REAL hard I'll tell ya!

Folks like myself tend to move around. At least I did move around, like a blind turtle. I've finally retired from the road. Once I found my Eden, I sank my roots as far as they could reach through the rich soil and watery pockets below. This place will remain untouched by shopping malls and time shares, and will remain lush and green as long as heaven weeps for mankind, It's what I had been searching for in my helter skelter wanderings.

The draw back to being a traveler is that you tend to be hard to keep up with. Most other people make the occasional move so if I didn't stay on top of my correspondences they slipped through my grasp and boy did a few really good ones slip away. That's why I have been more adamant about keeping my contacts and sifting through the rubble of my wanderlust for clues. Little tidbits of information that lead me back to the cherished friends of days gone past.
For some reason, I feel like I should at least send a postcard saying,
"Hey, you were a good friend I'll never forget. Thank you."
Nothing committal or worth committing me over.

I believe that everyone needs to hear now and then that their life made a difference, that someone is thankful that they are alive, and all was not for not. So I drop the occasional insane card to someone that is now a complete stranger just to make them feel valuable. Lord knows more oft than not the people closest to us neglect that need; not intentionally, it's just that we all take it for granted that those we love are aware that we love them.

So don't wait until you have to get tickets to the John Edwards Show to say "Hey, how ya doin? I miss you."

You may find out that someone values you as well.
You don't have to get mushy or anything.
6/14/2005 11:10 PM
word count 396

Digital Finger Food

I love my gardens, cats and dog so much it breaks my heart to even think about a trip. I over compensate by bringing as many creature comforts as possible with me. The things I carry everywhere are what I call finger foods. Popcorn Chicken and Doritos do not fall into this category like you might expect. I reserve this category for things that my hands specifically crave. Things that keep them preoccupied and out of trouble. That’s where my fanny pack filled with miniature miracles of our modern age comes in. I have the gizmos!

Such essentials as QuickPAD, digital recorder, palm sized video camera, camera, cells and any other pocket sized devices I can squeeze into my budget wise digital fanny-pack. Since I am unable to go anywhere lightly, I cram as much as possible into the suitcases. These days the limits are much more strict and fifty pounds is it. I was 4 pounds over this last trip. So it was either leave our belongings behind or buy the airlines overpriced bag. We bought the bag. After the realization that I was going to have to move a sum of the whole, braziers and panties included, into another bag in front of …people, I decided to rush the operation and did the grab and stuff.

The hastily chosen items freely tussled inside the flimsy, oversized sports bag. So when we got to our destination, I had a plethora of semi-permanent wrinkles in my entire wardrobe of wrinkle-free travel attire. I suppose being covered in a haphazard pattern of unflattering lines isn’t the end of the world or the end of the trip, just the end of the primping machine. No amount of fussing can detract from the obvious signs of poor packing technique. I got over it. I had to.
Now that I’m home again, every day I come up with several new reasons why I shouldn’t take any more trips . Just being gone a couple weeks left two months of work that couldn't wait for my recuperation. I’ve been at it hard and still don’t feel like I’ve made any headway.

The perpetual cycle of hurriedness my life has been in is tiresome. It didn’t start out that way, it evolved. For instance, yesterday started out rushed, I guess it would be more realistic to say that it continued to be rushed. Continued as in for years now. Each week, month or year has it’s unique list of excuses attached to the drudgery that eclipses the sunniest of afternoons. Am I addicted to tension? Gosh, I hope not. I’ve been operating under the premise that I hate it. My anti-anxiety arsenal goes everywhere with me. You already read the list.

You may be thinking that there's a pill for that, and you'd be right, but taking the pill wouldn't be nearly as much fun...although it would be loads lighter.
6/7/2005 0:10 AM
word count 505

Pre-flight Bitchfest

Before brushing his lips across my cheek, he whispered, " Six am, that's when the tornado will be here. Good night."
I answered with a sigh, never taking my eyes off my mending. I knew what that meant; he wanted me to go straighten up the basement before I headed off to the billowing surrealism beneath my patchwork quilt. The rest of my sewing would have to wait, so would my fatigue.
I had paid two bits for a 1908 copy of Cicero at a spontaneous farm sale stop before our trip and it patiently awaited my return. A poem I had found discretely tucked between the pages, plodded along at an even gate just as it had all day. They say that if a fairy whispers a tune into your ear while you're sleeping, you'll be stuck with it all day as it runs it's endless cycle. Mischievous little mothers helpers! That must've been what happened to me last night.
This particular copy was an old text book that someone had grown very fond of, so much so that he had chosen not to return it. There were little notes stuffed here and there, poetry by Longfellow and all sorts of other scratch. It had even changed hands once, to a young lady whom admired he or his cherished contraband. My favorite selection of the long dead scientific and literary investigators, the one lingering in my mind as I pushed the needle repetitively all evening, was the following:

The heights by great men reached and kept,
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they,
While their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.

I had to smirk at my sardonic view of the timeless poetry in my present state of self pity.
Mumbling to my invisible friend,
"Yeah right,
The heights attained by schmuck's and kept,
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But their companions,
while they slept
Were toiling upward in the night,
And it ain't right I tell ya
It ain't right!"

Why can't I have a maid like all those foo-foo people with the camera-phone implants you see sipping Starbucks with Armani men?
My little friend, the invisible thingumbob that gets blamed for everything, well, she piped in, "...because you take the good with the bad. It's called balance. It's the grand design, yin and yang..."
Oh shut up! When I made that mess down there I wasn't thinking about surprise visits by any Warner Brothers cartoon characters or their namesakes. Why can't we just postpone tornado season a few more days so I can get caught up around here, go to bed NOW and sleep in, just once? ...Tomorrow would be nice.

Now I know that John wouldn't show any concern one way or the other had I decided to ignore his hint. And I know that we could've slipped down the stairs in the night without tripping over anything had we needed to. I just have this bad habit of wanting to please him no matter how bitchy it makes me.
6/5/2005 1:40 AM
word count 512

Some Times, Saving Ain't Saving

There's a lot of preparatory work involved in vacationing. There is also a lot of work in being on vacation. Living out of a suit case is never fun. That part you just live with.
If you didn't bring it, it falls into one of two categories; you either don't really need it and had best put it out of your mind, or you do, and it's only as far away as the nearest Walmart Super Center. So you try to pack light. For people like me, that don't travel much, packing is enough to bring on a nervous break down, so you pack the Xanax. After that, anything forgotten is a minor faux pas. After two Xanax, it's erased completely from the conscious and semi-conscious mind for the next 4 to 6 hours.

The last time I flew nail clippers were not considered a dangerous weapon, that is, not until the return flight. My last leisure trip scheduled for takeoff soon after those chemically unbalanced sheet heads declared war on the USA. I became a little concerned over everyone else not wanting me to cancel my flights.

Aside from being cornered into the purchase opportunity on account of our suitcase being 4 pounds over weight, of an extra large sport bag of the cheesy mail order variety offered by our airline at the low-low price of $25 , I guess we did okay. I should say, I did okay, John had to haul them all over three states.

We did the usual gift buying and stayed one step ahead of a ruptured disc by mailing our purchases home. That did however eat four hours out of our trip. It wasn't easy finding the proper packaging for an old 1960's Hummingbird guitar I bought back from my brother-in-law. Even my favorite, Rich Hunts, was no longer there. I guess he got tired of running a store and a music career. We could've saved time if we hadn't sat waiting for the local replacement music store owner to leisurely open his doors only to find he had no boxes. It wasn't a complete loss though, he told us where to find the new music mega center out by the electronics super center. I was so lost. I grew up there, but nothing was the same. Last I checked that area was covered in a large chicken ranch.

We found the place. They tried to sell me a hard shell case for twice what I recently paid at MusiciansFriend.com and I told him so. We rummaged the dumpster for guitar boxes and boy were there boxes! My old Hummer came home in style in a top-of-the-line Taylor cardboard box, inside a Takamine sarcophagus(My personal favorite axe maker). It arrived unscathed. No NEW scathing that is, I scathed the shit out of it years earlier at a beach party in Del Mar and various other volleyball BBQ's I attended before public consumption of alcoholic beverages was banned by the healthy people, which I might add did manage to make it illegal to be a smoker in public places as well since I left. Wouldn't want that to compete with all the other grayish-orangy colored stuff floating in the air now would we?

We still came home with more than we left with. I can blame my unbreakably annoying habit of value shopping. I ran out of shampoo and could not pay $1 for a wee little vial when I could get 4 pounds of it for the same. I made that kind of purchase more than once. And now we have this stupid sports bag we'll never use again, but the best part is, I've got all my unnecessary essentials surrounding me, right where I like them.
6/2/2005 2:11 AM
word count 647