Rituxan In the Morning

Yesterday was another infusion day, so I spent the morning hooked up to an IV drip in a comfy bed at the Infusion Center reading "Cannery Row" by John Steinbeck which I had not done before despite my enthusiasm for Steinbeck and his dyspeptic vision of California's Central Coast and its society.

In that regard, I should mention that my (new found) cousin sent me a journal kept by her mother and our aunts that has an extended section  telling tales about their cross country rail expedition from Washington DC (where they were working at the WPA headquarters) to The Coast, where they did and saw everything. They saw all the sights from the Redwoods to San Francisco's Golden Gate and International Exposition at Treasure Island to Hollywood and Beverly Hills where they hob-nobbed with the movie stars and studio honchos. They went out to the beach and sunburned lobster red, they even went to Mexico, briefly, and saw a disgusting bull fight.

This was 1939. They passed through the Salinas Valley on their way to Los Angeles, but I can't imagine they noticed much. Certainly not the wretchedness and waves of travelers up from Mexico and still crossing the country from Oklahoma. What they reported and what they saw was the idealized tourist vision of California. There was always some truth to it, but it never told the whole story. Not by a long shot.

Steinbeck fills in some of the blanks, but he was hated for it in and around Salinas. His stories of his home place and the people there were stories you weren't supposed to tell. I grew up in other parts of California being socialized to that same notion. There are simply things you do not mention. If you're smart, you won't even look into them.

For example, I spent years studying the Gold Rush and the people who made their way to California between 1849 and about 1855. I reviewed all kinds of original documents kept at the California State Library and other places, and scoured the Gold Country for remaining clues to what was going on in those days.

The picture that emerged was nothing like the glorified and romantic image of the Gold Rush we were taught in school -- and I guess is still widely believed. For many who made the trek, it was horrible. Many died along the way or shortly after arrival. It cost a fortune to make the trip, and the chance of finding gold or even surviving more than a few months was slim to none.

And yet they kept coming. By the hundred thousands and ultimately by the millions they kept coming. My mother and her mother and stepfather among them. Most of my father's siblings -- but not himself -- came and settled in California, too.

Ms Ché and I left, though. She was born in California, and I lived there almost all my life, and the two of us could hardly wait to move to New Mexico.

Where I think we've never been happier -- health issues for both of us aside.

And so it goes.

Yes, there are plenty of challenges in front of us, and many memories left behind (along with a storage unit full of... stuff, including some of those memories...)

Perseverance, yes. But ultimately relaxation and freedom, too.

More to come.

OT: Relax

And now for something completely different...



When I was running a theater, I used to put "Relax" on the sound system and play it full blast while I was doing my day work. When I took phone calls, the people on the other end thought I must be going deaf or needed to adjust my meds.

I now know that there are lots of different video versions of "Relax", but at the time, I'd only seen one, the one that's posted here (supposedly the banned version, but I don't know who "banned" it.) I thought it was a pretty accurate representation of what our theater was like, day and night. Our S&M Salome was one of the high (or was it low?) points, but there were many others. We did hundreds of productions and staged readings. Not all of which involved leather and the fat man, but some did.

We were infested with "Dogs," as in "Rebellion Dogs," a recovery group whose facilitator was a friend of a friend, a Vietnam Vet and a real character. His charges were characters, too. They took the sobriquet "Dogs" quite literally, forming themselves into packs and running completely wild when they weren't doing their recovery business. ("Rebellion dogs" is from a phrase in Bill W's AA book, something about "rebellion dogs your every effort to end addiction" -- it's a VERB!)

But they did a lot of the backstage work and of course they were very friendly, so I let them have their way most of the time.

Artists of all stripes and kinds became part of our community, some tried to become part of the family. Everything you see in the video is pretty much what was going on pretty much all the time.

Don't ask if I miss it. All I can say is politics is tame by comparison.

(NB: And while I have been around tigers, it was a lion that eventually ran a claw through my thumb while I was trying to extricate a young lady's hand from the lion's mouth. So there we were, the two of us, held fast by the lion wondering what the hell do we do now? Along comes someone with a stick and whacks the lion's cage with it. The lion lets go. Whew!)

(NBB: Holly Johnson was a friend of mine and a friend of the theater. But she wasn't THIS Holly Johnson, with whom it was easy to identify...)