Last night, sitting on the front porch drinking beer with Darlene, trying to say good-bye, Kimchee, whom we'd allowed ourselves to think we'd ditched, came roaring around the corner in full intrusion, blathering about something in her half-Korean pidgin; I simply shouted her down with a funny story about a brave tomcat I once knew, and fled, never really having said good-bye to Darlene. So, thinking that she'd already gone, I walked back by her place this afternoon on my way over to Kristen's, and lo! there was Darlene sitting out on the front porch with her very agreeable sister-in-law, whom I had met once months ago, and whose name I remembered, and she remembered my name. So then, once and finally, Darlene and I gave one another the parting hug, and it was over.

Word has it Phil wants me to call him, so I will tomorrow morning; it'll be early evening in alt Deutschland. He could, if he but would, communicate with me here, or e-mail me, but he's on vacation and wants to talk, I think. Anyway, one of the things that I think would gratify the Prophet MacLuhan is the effortless instantaneity of communication in the third millennium, just as He predicted (sort of). Maybe Robert Heinlein, maybe Isaac Asimov, in their various ways (the former's 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the latter's 'I, Robot'), foresaw earliest the implications of the Universal Algorithm and Cyberspace; maybe Georg Leibnitz. This is stuff I have to Google. Lovely day swimming naked and alone in the river, and lovely prospect of more of the same (highs in the daytime of 90's, lows in the 50's at night) for the next week at least, so promised by the national weather service.

Hence away (before noon)! Think I'll see what Kristen has planned this afternoon, maybe phoning from Patty's. Darlene's going away leaves a noticeable hole in my life. But there is to be swimming in the river, whate'er else. If I can find a light enough shirt (ah, agreeable perplexity), I'm outta here.

I've seldom smoked as much of the sacred herb as I have today, among Kimchee, Marcus, my neighbour from across the hall, and Darlene, severally and serially. Getting stoned and getting my teeth cleaned is what this day has been about--and seeing Darlene finally off to Olympia to school. Also, of course, it's payday for us SSI recipients who are paid our stipend on the 1st of the month, or on the friday before the 1st, if the 1st fall on a weekend as this July 1st does. So, in less than 36 minutes of this counting, at midnight, I shall be $603.00 richer. I like, when I first get my money, within the first few hours, to indulge a few harmless pleasures. Usually I go round to the Satellite Diner, which is open till 4:00 a.m., and is full of charm and atmosphere and wide-awake young people, and have one of their many specialty omlets, which if you sit at the counter you can watch the charming and literate short-order cook prepare right in front of you. But the reality of my gut hanging before me contraindicates that too-usual, innocent little debauch.

Did pretty much as I said I'd do. Swimming in the river was delicious; so was steak and fresh garden vegetables dinner Kristen made us. Thing is, she got drunk on beer too early to be any damned much good playing music. Peeked in afterwards on Darlene, then on Patty: Everybody was tired, but euphoric that the weather hadn't quite got as hot as predicted. Still it was hot in the Palace when I got in just after curfew, took a cool shower, and fell asleep under the fan. Blessedly fresh this morning.

Caldissimo oggi, at least ninety-nine degrees. I'm making plans to go swimming, play more Mozart and Handel, wearing super light and brief swimming trunks, which I am almost too fat really in good conscience to do. Have discovered one Rictor Norton, whose essays and books on Queer History are pungent, informative "essentialism," much to my taste.

'Twas hot yesterday, 'twill be really hot today. Thank god for an electric fan, and for a regional climate where the heat index is always a few degrees lower than the actual temperature in the daytime, and for the thirty-five degree difference between nighttime and daytime temperatures. I remember a sincere gentlewoman in Georgia, bo'n and bred, who once had made a trip as far west as Colorado in the summer. I asked her what she thought of the concept of heat without humidity, and she said she had found it strange and unpleasant and that it made her thirsty. She also said, "Why you know if you take a slice of bread and leave it on the table, in just twenty minutes you'll find it as dry as toast!"

Parting supper with Kimchee and Darlene, who treated me, last night at another good Vietnamese restaurant, Vino's by name. Darlene and I had hot 'n sour soup, Kimchee had the squid soup; we all had prawns and heavenly, basilly spring rolls with peanut sauce. Darlene is all packed and ready to go on Friday morning, walls and windows are washed so she can get her damage deposit back. And now, funnily, she doesn't want to entertain company or have anybody drop by. She just wants to be alone in her nice old apartment, living out of boxes till it's time to go. She said come back by Tuesday, after Lutheran supper, and I will.

How old is mankind? I've asked experts; they say maybe 100,000 or 150,000 years, but no firm fossil evidence before about 50,000 years ago. In the search for this knowledge, I have discovered something that calls itself "Alternative Science," and one Dr. Virginia Steen-McIntyre, whose single Mexican site would put our age at 250,000 years; but the good Doctor is evidently delusional. I personally feel that we should go with the fossil record: Let us say that we developed, diverged from our parent chimpanzee/human stock, rather suddenly, about 57,000 years ago. Is it assumed that we were troglodytes? Think of Marco Polo's "castles of logs and rubbish" that he built on the sands of Sumatra on his voyage back from China, "for a place to be safe from great beasts." Men may always have done so.

The Puppet Masters

You never see them. Only, sometimes, their hands. Maybe you can figure out who they are, but usually only long afterwards. They are the ones who made sure that Abraham Lincoln would be elected, and surrounded him with Pinkerton men when he was: in order that the Civil War might be fought; and in order that certain peculiarly swinish, irresponsible economic interests (bankers, munitions manufacurers, railroads) in the Western and North-Eastern United States might make a profit on it.
You see their hands in the infamous Mexican, Spanish-American, Korean, Vietnam, Iraq I, and Iraq II Wars (not to mention Clinton's dirty and dirtying little assault on Serbia), and, of course, in the absurd American involvement in World War I. The hands, the sense of being manipulated are not so evident in World War II. In that, the sense, so to speak, of things having gotten out of hand, is overriding, and from the attack on Pearl Harbor until the restraint suddenly put on General Patton, there is little discernible puppetry. But at Yalta, and Potsdam, and in the decision to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in the deliberate cold-blooded perpetration of a fraudulent Cold War, and War on Terror, their hands are all over everything.

Not far from where I live, at the end of a short blind alley, under a fire escape, is written, apparently ineradicably, by some great graffitist of the 70's, "Dragons killed the Kennedys." And that, for me, pretty much says it. There is deep truth in it. What was J. Edgar Hoover if not an Obscene Beast? What are obscure, black-budgeted, para-military "security agencies" if not Dragons? And now


Awake, the morning shines, and the fresh field
Calls us, we lose the prime, to mark how spring
Our tended plants, etc.

I am drunk on Handel and Midsummer. Kristen, incidentally, fed me a fine supper of spareribs, noodles, and fresh peas (I helped shell them)--the wine being a crisp, oaky/fruity Chardonnay--and a crunchy lettuce salad for which I made the soured-and-sweetened half-'n-half dressing, such as I remember my mother making, of a midsummer's eve more than half a century ago. It's hard to believe the extent to which affairs in the Great World have gone to hell in a handbasket; while here in the timeless abode of the River Dragon we still drift and expatiate, play music and speculate, unhindered and unthreatened--or, at least, fairly certain that I'm hardly worth the bother of threatening. One remembers, of course, that the four vagabonds randomly chosen by Dan Mitreone as victims in his infamous toruring-to-death seminar in Uruguay were, precisely, persons of no consequence....

It could happen any day,
So be careful what you say
And do.

Melanie (her real name), a former inmate of the Palace and a valued friend (she loved to listen to me playing Byrd and Purcell), was found stabbed and beaten to death in an alley this morning a block and a half from here. I used to call her my "Good Fairy."

Weather at last, yesterday, turned into high summer, full solstitial gear: swirly
Dragon clouds, Sun seemingly forever at noon. Kristen and I ploughed through a couple more Handel organ concertos, then, after coffee and a pipe in the backyard, lying back in lawn-chairs watching the aforementioned swirly dragon clouds, we did a rather perfunctory 'Drumroll.' We were just a little bit off, couldn't find our centers, tired. Still, Marcus pronounced our Handel "very pretty," as it must have seemed to him out in the flowerbeds, pulling up the spent forget-me-nots.

'Ts-been unseasonably wet. Already we're (12") more than four inches over our usual (8") yearly average rainfall for this date. Lichens have turned every exposed wood surface into psychedelic art, fluorescent yellow-green vying with glowing green-grey. The smell of roses everywhere is, like that of the many herbal sachets hung in the curtains of a Dowager Empress's bed, "almost nauseating till you get used to it." I understand that Princess Der Ling has written more extensively of Tzu-Hsi in a book called 'Old Buddha,' and this I have got, by hook or crook, to read. One interesting, indeed arresting, discovery that I have made is that Tzu-Hsi's birthday, November 29th, 1835, was just one day before Mark Twain's birthday (11/30/'35). How bizarre is that? Polar opposites, so to speak (or, it must be said, bi-polar).

Yesterday, with Kristen, knocked down another Handel organ concerto, a sweet, brilliant Haydn symphony in G Major (not the Oxford), and a bit of 'Zauberfloete.' Desultory talk--We were both, apart from the stimulus of the music, feeling rather tired on account of the rain. Thence round to Darlene's who treated me to some of Kimchee's finest and a glass of chardonnay. D. says she's going for a Master's in Italy and Greece, and I'm happy to see that that is very likely what she will do.

Thunder/rainstorm! At this hour of the morning very surprising. On est e'tonne'. This was why, on the first of January, I went to Rite-Aid and bought a beautiful black-and-white golf-umbrella. I've just finished reading Lady Der Ling's memoir: Such a wonder was that Dowager Empress, exemplifying just about everything that was bad and wrong with Ch'ing China, and knowing it. Speaketh the Dowager Empress: "Be sure not to tell her anything connected with the Court life and do not teach her any Chinese...The less she knows the better for us. I can see that she has seen nothing of our ordinary Court life, as yet. I wonder what she would say if she were to see one of the eunuchs being punished, or anything like that. She would think we were savages, I suppose...It is better that she should not see me in a temper, she might talk about it afterwards."

By the way, that spectacular rainbow/window in the sky we all saw one the 3rd of June is styled by meteorologists (and such) a "circumhorizon arc" ("Zircumbogen" auf Deutsch), who evidently don't know what else to call it. The one we saw here in Spokane was, apparently, a very big and bright one.

Long walk yesterday to the back side of the cemetery at the west end of Peacful Valley, a journey I have made many times--It's enchanted, holy ground; there are hidden wonders (grotto with spring, natural waterfall) that but few know of. I go there in the guise of Hermes Psychopompous, wandering from gravestone to gravestone, reading the names and the dates. In days of yore I'd've been listening on my Walkman to Mozart or Vivaldi (fast-forwarding through the slow movements), or Albinoni (not fast-forwarding through the slow movements), and Doggie would've been with me.

I've been reading a lot lately. Funny how the more you read, the more you find time to read. Seldom do I read in the cemetery, as I always plan to do, but lately, Googling one thing and another, I have come upon treasures, complete online texts: Mark Twain's hatchet-job on Mary Baker Eddy and her silly-ass cult; and Princess Der Ling's memoirs of her two years' waiting on the last Dowager Empress of China. Some real stunners in the latter. Turns out her Imperial Majesty's favorite snack (oh so quaintly described by Princess Der Ling) is pork rinds. Lots of physical cruelty in the service of Old Buddha, slapping, beating with sticks--apparently this is the way to get maximum efficiency out of a household staff of maids and eunuchs.

Rain again. Friday's got shelter last night and tonight--as I know from talking to him at City Gate at supper--but not, maybe, tomorrow night. I felt so guilty talking to him--starting out with cozy, careless confidentiality about how I've already blown a hundred dollars of this month's stipend on nothing in particular--and realizing towards the end of my stupid little confession what that hundred dollars would have meant to him. What traps we lay for ourselves.

God damn it! I cannot get the italic function to work. I don't know whether it's my computer settings or Blogspots which are so disenabled....Ah but there, I actually went to the 'help' page, and followed instructions, and Voila italics. Now if I could just get my accents graves, circonflex, and aigus to work.....

I've been losing blogs lately...parts of Life faithfully recorded and minutized; then I hit the 'publish button' and (zowwie presto!) it gets deleted. This is discouraging if you believe as Jack Kerouac and I believe that typing is writing. Saw Friday standing in the line at sack-lunches-giveaway last night. Evidently, he had not gone to Seattle as I had hoped and feared he might. He is, rather, in camping-out-by-the-river-in-Spokane mode. Which will do, of course, until the first frost. Then life will get hard again. I asked him, "Why, for Heaven's sakes, don't you just pick up and head for San Francisco or Humboldt County?" And he replied meekly and sadly, "Jeez, I don't know anybody there." 'T-any rate, I got about half of his stuff out of my closet and brought it down to him (Walter's eighty-sixing him stilling holding force). I had been looking forward to the rain which should arrive tonight and last through tomorrow; now I'm wondering about "tempering the wind to the shorn lamb." Doest thou?

Lovely thunderstorms today. Now, before I quite forget, I witnessed a very strange meteorological phenomenon last week. I scarcely know how to describe it. It was just on noon, mid-way between the sun and the southern horizon in the the sky: a big oblongish shimmering horizontal rainbow/window through which clouds passed and changed colors. I was not alone witnessing it, and several of the people I was with were taking pictures of it, as it hung there for an incredibly long time, maybe twenty or twenty-five minutes--whatever it was. "Sun Dog," as defined in the Wikipedia it was not; or if it was, it was the only sun dog ever observed at midday in high summer.

D-Day. We miss the Good War. Weather's lovely. Been doing well with Kristen, working our way through "the red book," a double volume of twelve Haydn symphonies. Saturday we dispatched the 'Jagd' and the Schulmeister,' yesterday we done in the 'Abschied' and la 'Poule.' There were 'Jenny kissed me' moments. Thence to Darlene's where also were Kimchee and Bob (from downstairs), much merry chat, good green tea, several kinds of pot, some truth-telling. Kimchee is, of course, now that I look at her, bi-polar. Duh. I'm glad I wasn't any meaner to her than I was. Darlene is doing very well, registering for classes online, excited about it. I like artists.

Religion

I do, actually, have a Religion, my particular religion, which I have invented, and for which I take entire responsibility. Till now it has had no name, but I will deem it the church of Conscience, Heart and Penis (or Love Button, or whatever you've got): these are the gods within myself whom I worship, and whom I serve. Things accounted holy in my church are Truth, Beauty, Compassion, Respect, Honor, Good Faith, Discernment, Disinterested Friendliness, Knowledge, Wisdom--and that ain't all, but, with the addition of Cleanliness and Cuteness, we could call our list of holy things tolerably complete.

The Music Sense

Not everybody has it--maybe half, maybe less. It's hard to describe to the other fifty per cent what it is. Let us say that it means the capacity to be delighted by a Haydn symphony; call it the Music Sense. Shakespeare was maybe too hard on those that don't have it--"fit for Treason, Stratagems and Spoils". Think of Gertrude Stein who didn't have it, and Alice B. Toklas who did. I don't imagine that Alice thought any the less of Gertrude [Though they did, sort of, quarrel sometimes, and "Treason, Stratagems, and Spoils" is something they might have made ironic fun of.] who was as frankly bored by any and all music as Jackie Collins is "not ashamed" to be bored by Shakespeare; even though she herself [Alice], was in her own right a great cook and a great cookbook-writer, and so susceptible to the power of music, and so understanding of it, that she could hear, and "see," that a Chopin scherzo, well played, can be, among other things, the musical equivalent of a great cutlet.