Between the Bombs

August 6 was Hiroshima Day, tomorrow, August 9, is Nagasaki Day. Two atomic bombings at the end of World War II, authorized by the new president Harry S Truman, bombings which instantly incinerated some 130,000 to 200,000 people and led to the radiation poisoning of hundreds of thousands more. Also the obliteration of large portions of two cities, neither of which was particularly active in the War. Oh well. So it goes.

 It's also the 100th anniversary of the start of WWI, The War to End Wars...

We have an image of what the atom bombings were like that may not align with the testimony of survivors, in part because atomic weapons were and are intended as terror weapons. Their potentials for wholesale destruction and misery are highlighted in order to inspire fear and terror in domestic and "enemy" populations alike. Those of us of a certain age have been conditioned to believe that no survival is possible from a nuclear attack; it would not just be the End of the World As We Know It, it would be the end of everything forever and ever amen. There would be and could be no survivors, at all, for all time to come. Well, maybe a few...

This Democracy Now! episode from 2011 links the atomic bombings of Japan with the Fukushima disaster -- which seems to be getting worse, not better.

Those who survived the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, perhaps 30% to 50% of the populations of those cities, can testify to how awful the bombings were. Many of those in positions of authority and power at the time have testified that the atom bombings were not necessary from a military point of view. They were egregious terror bombings meant more to cow the Japanese population and government and to put The Fear into the Soviets than anything else. Japan surrendered shortly after the atom bombings. The Soviet Union and the United States never got into a hot war with one another -- though there were many through proxies during the so called Cold War -- in part thanks to the fear of what a hot war with nuclear weapons would do to human kind.

Now, though, there is what looks like a growing contingent of folks who believe that not only would a nuclear war be survivable for a significant number of people, it might be desirable to have an all out nuclear war, in order to 1) reduce global populations by a substantial degree -- but not eliminate the species; 2) demonstrate that the fear of nuclear war was exaggerated during the Cold War; 3) assert dominance over the globe by whoever survives and "wins" a nuclear war, and 4) prove once and for all that as bad as nuclear war is, it's not as bad as extinction due to global warming or an asteroid hit or something like that.

Fewer people overall and dominance by a select group who survive because they protect themselves from nuclear weapons and their consequences seem to be the objectives of those who believe a nuclear war is survivable. As I recall, the madman Donald Rumsfeld pursued the idea back in the day. He seemed to become convinced that nuclear war was survivable when he was a young man in the 1950s.

As this Blood Summer continues to careen into the abyss, more and more voices are raised against the madness. Even some of the elites who have made such a mess of things seem to realize that there are catastrophic, indeed apocalyptic, consequences inherent in continuing on the path of bloodshed on so many fronts in so many lands.

The Gaza conflict has resumed as talks broke down in Cairo. Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and large parts of sub-Saharan Africa are enveloped in chaos and bloodshed.

Is this a prelude to something worse? Many people can't help but think so.

And if it is?

Another Officer Involved Killing in Albuquerque

In this case, it was a Bernalillo County Sheriff's deputy who shot the man. There is video of the incident from a surveillance camera. It's a frightening and violent encounter.



The man's ex-girlfriend seems to agree that he "needed killing."

The way these things tend to go, this event will be used by some to justify most or all police shootings.

Because someone has been a threat or might pose a threat or because the officer 'feared for his life,' any use of force by police has long been considered justified on its face.

The problem in this case is that after the man had rammed his girlfriend's car, had tried to run her down,  and had rammed the deputy's car twice, he got out of the truck he was driving and was backing away from the deputy with his hands up when he was shot and killed.

Whether or not he "needed killing," he was not posing a threat at that moment, nor does it appear from the video that he intended to be a threat at that moment.

Does this make it a justified killing or was it a summary execution?

Just A Thought

More and more people are waking up to the danger signs all around us and more and more of them are combining forces to try to stop the Neo-Imperial madness engulfing the globe. Whether it will be enough remains to be seen.

Hut Sut Rawlson on the Rillerah and a Brawla, Brawla Sooit

For some reason, I always associated this song with Hudson automobiles when I was young, though it has nothing to do with Hudsons, and no one we knew when I was a kid had a Hudson. That seems strange now because Hudsons were highly respected and well-known, and the Post War Hudsons, 1948-54, were some of the wildest-styled scarab beetle autos of the era. Practically every other car brand from those days I remember very well, whether Chevrolet, Plymouth or Ford, or one of the fancier kind like your Packards and Cadillacs and Lincolns and such. There were Studebakers and Nashes among our friends and even an odd jalopy or two, those rattle-trap coupes and broken-down sedans from the 20s and early 30s with wood-spoke wheels and heavy grinding shifters on the slick rubber or metal floorboards. Oh, I remember the cars from those days very well and loved riding in cars, smelling the smell of the cars and tobacco smoke and open air and rubber and exhaust, listening to the radio, probably Fibber McGee and Molly or something, and driving around the countryside.

Jack Kerouac reported in "On the Road" that Neal Cassady made a lot of money when he was working as a brakeman for the Southern Pacific in San Francisco one year. He saw a Hudson, a brand new 1949 Hudson, and decided he wanted one, so he went to his bank, withdrew all his money, and bought one and went driving. For three months it is said he drove all over the country and to Mexico and back in his 1949 Hudson Commodore, driving with Jack and Allen and Louanne and various girls and hitchhikers until they drove back to California, and the Hudson was repossessed because Neal never made a payment oh it in those three months, and so they didn't have a car anymore.

This story has long been taken as a kind of gospel, but there is actually no evidence that Neal ever bought a Hudson, 1949 or otherwise. It's not even certain that many of the episodes Kerouac reported to have taken place in or with the Hudson in "On the Road" ever did. One thing I've wondered about is why, if Neal made a lot of money with the SP and took his entire savings to buy the 1949 Commodore, he would have any payments due on it. Hudsons weren't cheap, true. Fancy ones actually cost more than Cadillacs or Lincolns or Packards in those days, but still. So I don't know. Did Neal have a Hudson, or was Kerouac's report of it a novelist's conceit because the car looked like jazz and it fit the story's artistic development? Hard to say.

This passage in the Original Scroll Version of "On the Road" is one that popped out at me because of its jazzy-ness, and it has something to do with the Hudson, though it isn't mentioned:

Everything happened. We found the wild ecstatic Allen Anson and spent a night at his house in Long Island. Allen Anson lives in a nice house with his Aunt; when she dies the house is all his. Meanwhile she refuses to comply to any of his wishes and hates his friends. He brought this ragged gang of Neal, Louanne, Al and I and began a roaring party. The woman prowled upstairs; she threatened to call the police. “Oh shut up you old bag!” yelled Anson. I wondered how he could live with her like this. He had more books than I’ve ever seen in all my life…two libraries, two rooms loaded from floor to ceiling around all four walls, and such books as “The Explanation of the Apocalypse” in ten volumes. He played Verdi operas and pantomimed them in his pajamas with the great rip down the back. He didn’t give a damn about anything. He is a great scholar who goes reeling down the NY waterfront with original 14th century musical manuscripts under his arm, shouting. He crawls like a great spider through the streets. His excitement blew out of his eyes in great stabs of fiendish light. He rolled his neck in spastic ecstasy. He lisped, he writhed, he flopped, he moaned, he howled, he fell back in despair. He could hardly get a word out he was so excited with life. Neal stood before him with head bowed repeating over and over again “Yes…yes…yes.” He took me into a corner. “That Allen Anson is the greatest most wonderful of all. That’s what I was trying to tell you…that’s what I want to be…I want to be like him. He’s never hung up, he goes every direction, he lets it all out, he knows time, he has nothing to do but rock back and forth, man he’s the end! You see, if you go like him all the time you’ll finally get it.” “Get what?” “IT! IT! I’ll tell you---now no time, we have no time now.” Neal rushed back to watch Allen Anson some more. George Shearing the great jazz pianist, Neal said, was exactly like Allen Anson.

"Hut Sut Rawlson" is a novelty song from 1945 or so that continued being popular well into the 1950s. I sure remember it.

This is the Hudson that's kept at the Beat Museum in San Francisco. It's from the movie as there's no real proof that Neal Cassady ever had one.  But it's nice to think he might have.

Hudson merged with Nash, like Packard merged with Studebaker, and they all died out by the mid-to-late 50s. The big unique "bathtub" cars of the era made a splash and then were gone. Reminds me just a little bit of what happened to Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac come to think of it.

Hut-Sut Rawlson on the rillerah and a brawla, brawla sooit.
Hut-Sut Rawlson on the rillerah and a brawla sooit.
The brawla is the boy and girl, The Hut-Sut is their dream.
The sooit is the Teacher who caught them by the stream.
Now the boy and girl are back in school
Shattered is their dream
The teacher planted poison oak
All along the stream....

Liars, Thieves and Murderers -- The Empire of Chaos and Disruption Knows No Bounds

This year marks the 400th Anniversary of Don Juan de Oñate's exile from New Mexico and the New World. That may seem like a minor footnote in history, and for many people, it is. Oñate is not well known outside of Texas and New Mexico, but for many people here, especially Hispanos and Pueblo Indians, his record of conquest, chaos and cruelty cannot be forgotten. Though 400 years have passed since he was sent back to Spain for those very crimes and failings, his legacy lives on as an undercurrent in New Mexican society -- which may have something to do with the levels of police and public cruelty we are experiencing today.

Oñate's advent north of the Rio Grande was a disaster for the indigenous inhabitants whom he seemed to take immense pleasure in slaughtering and crippling, thieving from, lying to, and otherwise disrupting as he and his colonists made their way through the Puebloan communities proclaiming the Mercy of Christ and the suzerainty of Felipe Rey de Castile, Leon, y Aragon, and then killing them, crippling them, raping their women, enslaving the survivors and looting their pueblos.

Those were the days. Complaints were made, and in due time, Oñate would be recalled from New Mexico, trial would be held, and ultimately Oñate would be returned to Spain where he lived out his remaining years as a minor functionary to the King. 

This Blood Summer of Chaos and Disruption seems to be an echo of those times we thought we'd gotten past. Perhaps we haven't. At least in those days, appeal could be made to the King when the sub-rulers he set over his domains got out of control. Some record could be made and at least an attempt at justice and redress could be made. Now there's no one to intervene and seemingly nothing to be done.

Will there be no end to the madness of our rulers? As the world -- at least a goodly portion of it -- spirals ever further into the pits of perdition, one must ask: what must be done, and by whom, to halt the madness, bring dignity and peace to the multitudes, end the suffering of the innocent, repair and renew the global environment, and do those other things so necessary to survival and sanity?

Among the many tomes in our library of the obscure and forgotten, we have a number of books written in glum apprehension between the wars (that is between WWI and WWII) that either predict a New War Just Around the Corner or which posit means and methods to avoid one. The enemy is posited to be Germany and Japan, just as they would be in the end. There are a few anti-communist/anti-Russian volunes, but mostly the concern is over the aggression of Germany and Japan in Europe and Asia and the lesser but still worrisome aggression of Italy in Africa. As much as the capitalist class loathed and despised the nascent Soviet Union, they did not see it as an expansionist and aggressive threat. That would come at the end of World War II when, having defeated the totalitarian expansionist German Nazis and Japanese Empire, attention was turned to the prostrate, ruined Soviet Union as the New Threat. There always has to be an existential threat, doesn't there?

Europe and Japan would be rebuilt along Anglo-American capitalist lines (with a bit of Socialism thrown in to calm the restive masses for a while) and the Soviet Union would be ham-strung and boxed and allowed to play in Eastern Europe so that no one in the West need concern themselves with that region for the time being.

Red China was the New Dragon in the East. It was, of course, the offspring of Red Russia. Dealing with that unanticipated result of the Japanese defeat in WWII would take up most of the energy of the Western powers -- ultimately leading to military stalemate in Korea and military disaster and defeat in Vietnam.

There's little doubt that the totalitarian governing systems that expanded during the period between the wars were ruled by liars, thieves and murderers, as all large scale governing systems seem to be, including the vaunted Democracies. The totalitarians were just more overt about it, let's say, so it was obvious. There was no lack of liars, thieves and murderers in ruling positions within the "democratic" Imperial nations. The case could be made -- and some made it -- that for all their fine words about self-determination and democracy and whatnot, the Imperial West (particularly Imperial Britain, but no less so France and Belgium... and the United States) were monstrous in their colonial enterprises.  Liars, thieves and murderers only begins to describe what what unleashed on the uncivilized peoples of the world by those powers.

Ridding the world of the "uncivilized" peoples (sub-humans, actually) was something of an idealized goal. It could be accomplished by extermination when necessary -- viz: the various conquests and exterminations of the Native Peoples of the Americas -- or by conversion and/or assimilation. But the point was to make over all of the "uncivilized" peoples into some version of "civilized" and subservient or to make them be gone.

This was the Western European colonial enterprise in a nutshell.

And here we are again.

All of the current blood-lettings and slaughter-fests under way this summer appear to be some version of the colonial wars of yore, conquests for the purposes of subjugation, extermination, control and extraction of resources, and destruction of so-called primitive cultures which threaten the brutal and cruel cultures of the West and the powers they wish to assert over everyone on earth.

Here we go again.

None of these neo-colonial wars seem to be going well, but they do go on a very long time just the same. The victims pile up in ever-growing stacks of bodies, streets run with blood, cities are laid waste. There is a repeating cycle of disruption and destruction, revolt and suppression, and with each cycle, the cruelties become normalized.

New Mexicans may have been able to get rid of Oñate when time was, but getting rid of him did not get rid of his legacy, and even the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 -- viciously revenged in the de Vargas Reconquista of 1692-95 in which thousands of Indians were slaughtered -- did not fully restore what now had passed.

The cycle of violence and destruction we're in today will no doubt pass, and perhaps some of those responsible will be judged and a sense of justice restored, but what used to be cannot be restored -- and perhaps it shouldn't be.

May we nevertheless learn to be better.

Russell Brand Explains It All For You

 I've never been a huge fan of Brand for a variety of reasons, but in this episode of his YouTube program "The Trews" he makes the point that the Gaza-Israel situation is made worse by a belligerent and uninformed media exemplified by Sean Hannity and FOX in this instance. Of course like Hannity, Brand is an entertainer and both tend toward conflict and confirmation bias rather than rational discussion and/or provision of useful information. On the other hand, when the predominant position of media is more closely aligned with Hannity, the conflict is bound to continue for there is no way to stop it short of annihilation/subjugation/surrender.



The Guardian has made a big To-Do over it which at least gets it some attention.

I'll try to get into a little more of the underlying issues in a subsequent post.

"On the Road" -- by Jack Kerouac (The Original Scroll...)

Kerouac's Own Design for the book's cover, c. 1952

The Scroll Version is a lot more fun than I thought the original Signet paperback was when I read it sometime in the early-mid 1960s. It's looser and more open, more visceral -- though that's hard to imagine -- more lyrical, and strangely, without paragraphs, it's easier to read. It flows naturally, weaving a story in and out, and I think you could literally open it anywhere, start reading, go back, circle around, and even read the same passages several times without losing anything. It's that kind of novel. "Whitmanesque" it's been called. There is a linear plot and storyline, but that linearity is only part of the quality of the near-novel. Take it apart and there's just as much there, maybe more. It's brilliant, it's fun, it's sex, drink, drugs and be-bop. Too early, you see, for rock and roll.

I'm old enough to remember be-bop. Way older than Jack-John-Ti-Jean ever got to be, way older than Neal Cassady, the motor of the crazy-car/truck trip that Kerouac took across the country back when I was barely a gleam in my parents' eyes.

Neal Cassady's Bad Boy Smug mug shot 7-11-1944, Denver, CO

Kerouac in 1942, having joined the Naval Reserves. (I always thought he was taller than that).

It was a simpler and more innocent time? No it was not. It was a different time, and unlike "Dharma Bums," which seems very contemporary or timeless to me, "On the Road" is rooted in its time, it is very late '40s-early '50s, gritty and rough as things were back then. I can remember bits and pieces of my own life from the era (though I've lost many memories in the interims of age) and it wasn't a paradise, far from it. "Gritty and rough" is being charitable. It was a world that had been through the most appalling of wars, the most crippling of economic depressions, the most apocalyptic natural disasters. It was a world that had come apart at the seams and was by no means put back together again. But it seemed to them that the survivors had survived the worst that the world had to offer.

It was the Post-War era when so many things seemed possible. And it is the possibility of the era that animates the story and the road trip, the adventure, the re-discovery almost reconceiving of America. It could only have happened because of the hobos who pioneered the paths criss-crossing the country during the Depression when Jack-John-Ti-Jean was just a boy. He must have been moved by the stories, for the travel themes would stay with him throughout the remainder of his life.

"On the Road" weaves multiple travel threads together and clues the reader to how that traveling formed the consciousness of some of the writers and mavens and personalities of the era. They cannot be separated from their perambulations, but I'm not entirely sure how someone like Allen Ginsberg got from New York to Denver to San Francisco. Did he take the train? Surely he didn't hitch-hike or take the bus like Kerouac did. Or maybe he did. He might have. We'll let that question sit for a bit.

I've only just begun re-reading (for me, this is the first time with the Scroll version). So far, it's fascinating and notably clearer than when I read the Signet version...

"Today's wild youth..." you bet

In the Midst of This Blood Summer

It would appear that Pierre Omidyar has decided to pull the plug on his Grand Plan to Transform the Media at First Look and content himself with a blog or two that "experiment" with various means and methods of... what... exactly?

That's still something of a mystery, but the Grand Plan appears to be dead.

Some time back, Pierre put up a blog post that you wouldn't have known about unless you're following his twits or those of some of his stable of writers closely. I think I noticed it in passing through the comments on some post at The Intercept. It got little or no notice outside the world of the First Look at any rate, but it is an interesting walk back from all the promises announced and tub-thumped for so very long by the First Lookers and Interceptors -- without any discernible results for month after month, except one: the huge stable of writers Pierre had assembled essentially stopped writing once they signed with Pierre. Even the ever prolix and prolific Greenwald's output diminished to practically nothing for weeks at a time.

Reducing or eliminating output by formerly busy and sometimes power-questioning writers appeared to be the main purpose of First Look, as many observers pointed out, sometimes unkindly. Jeremy Scahill essentially disappeared; Matt Taibbi likewise. Oh they did their rounds for their book/movie tours, but that had nothing whatever to do with First Look or anything else that Pierre was involved in (so far as we know. He had his had in many ventures.) Laura Poitras has never contributed to The Intercept, nor has Liliana Segura. Marcy Wheeler bailed out months ago after contributing one piece. There were occasional pieces of generally "old news" by Ryan Gallagher and Ryan Devereaux, sometimes co-bylined by Greenwald, but likely not co-written by him. There were a few articles by Murtaza Hussain. But apart from that, practically nothing, month after month.

The lack of production and the frequency of excuses was striking, especially given all the other news startups going balls to the wall at around the same time, with special mention of Quartz, Vox, and Vice, but they are far from the only ones. They and many other online news sites have been running circles around Pierre's First Look (that was getting nowhere, with its one "magazine" that so rarely published and seemed quite flaccid when it did.) There was and is simply no comparison between First Look's practically absent content and the daily sometimes extraordinary content of a dozen or more online news ventures that were actually cranking out... erm... news.

So. John Cook appeared to order everyone to sit down and shut up and wait for however long it would take to get the operation up and running; it wasn't ready yet, and all the nay-sayers were poopy-pants. Greenwald would post when and if he wanted, and everyone else would be on hiatus until the site was "ready." So just shut up. Then he disappeared again, they said "on vacation". Who knew? Who cared?

First Look was looking more and more like the Last Look Back as news was being broken all over the media long before anything would appear in the one faltering "magazine" that was essentially a group blog on a broken WordPress platform, a group blog that hardly ever published or updated.

First Look and The Intercept were a joke.

Pierre had to intervene because this month-after-month of nothing made him look ridiculous for devoting $50 million or $250 million to... nothing. Wags made mock, to say the least.

Pierre's primary claim is that the enterprise is still very much a "startup." Which means, essentially, that it doesn't actually exist as a going concern, and it may never.

It is a still experimental experiment that may never go anywhere at all (startups are like that you know) and it is no longer positioned to be this "transformative" media thing-a-ma-bob that it was promoted as, but just what it will be, nobody knows. There will be Greenwald's blog and the now re-conceived Taibbi Thing (to debut sometime, one day... maybe) and that's about it.

Pierre will continue to support something similar to an investigative journalism enterprise, by funding things like travel and accommodations and legal fees and whatnot, but what comes of it, if anything, may be published elsewhere in already extant outlets rather than at anything new and transformative that Pierre has created out of the air.

In other words, First Look, as it was conceived is dead.

It ain't gonna be that.

And it may never be anything.

Got that?

Good.

There's a message here somewhere...
---------------------------------------------

In the meantime, Telesur English is up and running. Those devilish Chavistas. Check it out. 

Israel Rampages in Gaza Again

Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream

This happened was during today's "4 hour humanitarian cease fire." According to witnesses and reports from the scene, shortly after 12:00n local time, as residents (survivors?) of Gaza were attempting to get necessary supplies at a market section adjoining the Shujayea neighborhood, several mortar or tank shells landed among the shoppers, killing between 17 and 20 (a figure likely to increase significantly) and wounding hundreds. 

This is what Israel does: it declares a "cease fire" then waits for people to gather in response, then the IDF kills them. It kills them in hospitals. It kills them in refugee centers and schools. Wherever Gazans are gathered in large numbers for protection or under the banner of a "ceasefire," Israel aims its missiles and shells and kills them by the score, wounding many more. 

It is apparently an identity thing to the Israelis. 

Lull and lure the Arabs into believing their safety is assured. Then kill them.

This is how the UNRWA Representative in Gaza Christopher Gunness responded to the latest school shelling in which dozens were killed -- as they slept -- and hundreds were wounded:

The UNWRA statement is unusually blunt and harsh.

Statement by UNRWA Commissioner-General Pierre Krähenbühl

Jerusalem

Last night, children were killed as they slept next to their parents on the floor of a classroom in a UN designated shelter in Gaza. Children killed in their sleep; this is an affront to all of us, a source of universal shame. Today the world stands disgraced. 

We have visited the site and gathered evidence. We have analysed fragments, examined craters and other damage. Our initial assessment is that it was Israeli artillery that hit our school, in which 3,300 people had sought refuge. We believe there were at least three impacts. It is too early to give a confirmed official death toll. But we know that there were multiple civilian deaths and injuries   including of women and children and the UNRWA guard who was trying to protect the site.  These are people who were instructed to leave their homes by the Israeli army.  

The precise location of the Jabalia Elementary Girls School and the fact that it was housing thousands of internally displaced people was communicated to the Israeli army seventeen times,  to ensure its protection; the last being at  ten to nine last night, just hours before the fatal shelling. 

I condemn in the strongest possible terms this serious violation of international law by Israeli forces. 

This is the sixth time that one of our schools has been struck. Our staff, the very people leading the humanitarian response are being killed.  Our shelters are overflowing. Tens of thousands may soon be stranded in the streets of Gaza, without food, water and shelter if attacks on these areas continue. 

We have moved beyond the realm of humanitarian action alone. We are in the realm of accountability. I call on the international community to take deliberate international political action to put an immediate end to the continuing carnage.

As many have pointed out during this latest round of Israeli rampaging in Gaza, Israelis are losing their humanity. 

Indeed. But there are so many places where just that loss of humanity has become routinized. This Blood Summer still is only half over, too.

The Dharma, "The Dharma Bums," Prefiguring the Rucksack Revolution, and How We Got Here -- Or Something

This is the one I recall reading c. 1962 or 63; the cover illustration and blurb are simply silly

Jack Kerouac wrote "The Dharma Bums" in 1957 and published it in 1958 after the wild success of his first second published novel, "On the Road," which became a defining work of the Beat Generation. Most of the incidents described in "The Dharma Bums" apparently take place in California in 1955 and '56 with excursions to the South and Southwest and finally to the Northwest Desolation Wilderness where the novel's ending is set.

The key characters are novelized versions of Jack Kerouac himself (as Ray Smith) and Gary Snyder (as Japhy Ryder.) Ray is in his thirties, getting close to middle age, while Japhy is still in his mid twenties, or at least, those were the ages of Kerouac and Snyder during the period of the novel.

Japhy's on the Dharma Path and he lives in a shack out behind a big house on a hill while he goes to classes at UC Berkeley, drinks tea, meditates, contemplates Nature, expostulates and has wild parties and orgies and stuff.

Ray's on a Dharma Path as well, but in the telling of the tale, he's just a bum who drinks and writes and meditates and travels around with his rucksack meeting people, Bodhisattvas and Buddhas all, along the way.

Japhy has a purpose and will wind up going to Japan on a fellowship to study under Zen Mountains and Masters and become one himself. Ray just is. And you sort of know that like Kerouac, he will eventually drink himself to death just as the Rucksack Revolution that Japhy predicts and prefigures is about to climax and thence to peter out.

We know, because we've lived, what happens to these people.

Gary Snyder is now an old man, but he's still going strong they say, living a not-so-primitive life, surrounded by acolytes and devotees, probably none of whom remember him from back when, but that hardly matters as his diamond life has been one of constant becoming. There may or may not be a handful who have stayed with him since those Dharma Bum days, but most I would venture have long since, like Jack Kerouac, died off. Snyder is an honored elder in other words; the others are mostly long gone.

I read "The Dharma Bums" when I was maybe 14, I don't know exactly. It was a period during which I devoured everything I could get my hands on of Kerouac's work, and it continued pretty much consistently until I was 18 or so, when my attentions were focused elsewhere. I think I read "The Dharma Bums" first, then "On the Road," then "Desolation Angels" but the sequence could have been different as my memory has faded over the years and I can't even be sure that I'm remembering events and not imagining them. So much of my life has been an adventure, you might say, and I haven't kept good records.

When I was 14, of course, I could not and did not understand a lot of the references to Buddhism in "The Dharma Bums," and in re-reading it recently, I find some references are still a bit obscure, though most are easily digested now. I didn't really understand the point of the novel either. A travelogue, yes, but obviously something more as well, but I had no idea what. In re-reading it, of course, it is much clearer, and the point -- such as it is -- is obvious. It was probably not meant for a 14 year old to understand in any case.

The writing is as strikingly visual now as it was when I was merely a lad, and re-reading it is a powerful reminder of how penetrating those visuals were and are; the descriptions of place are so strong and I have been to so many of those very places or places like them or near them, that I feel I'm living the novel as I'm reading it. I recall some passages in re-reading that had a powerful present impact when I first read them, but much more often, it's simply words and phrases that pop out at me, not whole passages, and they trigger memories or just their presence within. Clearly, although I didn't understand much of the book, I internalized many of its elements.

That may well have happened to many others who read it around the same time and later, they would read the book and internalize its elements without necessarily understanding them or needing to. The book is a travelogue of sorts (as was, of course, "On the Road") but it's also a meditation on the meaning and discovery of existence and its illusory nature. The Dharma Path is the Buddha Path, and the wanderers in "The Dharma Bums" see themselves as Zen Lunatics sent out to bring joy and find enlightenment and to discover the illusion of their own existence and that of every other.

It's all an illusion, you see?

Practically everybody Ray-Jack encounters on his adventures as a Dharma Bum is a Buddha-Bodhisattva, which is something you discover when you're on that path, but it is a path not many are on at any given time, and while Ray-Jack discovers he can't fall off a mountain, he does fall off the path (it seems to me) more often than he realizes. That's part of the journey. If you're going to be a Zen Lunatic, you cannot always be what you think you are, nor can you always stick to the path you think you're on. As a Zen Lunatic, you are bound to diversions. Many and frequent. And so it is for Ray-Jack and for Japhy-Gary (who is at one point, just one time, called "Gary" in the novel).

Ray-Jack Writing-sleeping, posed for the photographer no doubt.

When you become famous, as Ray-Jack became famous shortly after finishing "The Dharma Bums", you have to pose for pictures like this. It's part of the job of a famous writer.

Gary Snyder having tea in his Dharma Shack, c. 1955?

Whether the picture of Japhy-Gary is posed for a famous-writer photographer, I can't be sure. It's posed, yes, but it has the feeling of a snapshot rather than a professional production, and that's probably intentional, no matter who took the picture or why. I wouldn't be surprised if it was in LIFE magazine, just because and for no other reason at all. Gary Snyder may have been only 25 or so, but he was already a Buddhist Master or near-master. At least in the context of the USofA where Buddhism was still exotic and Anglos practicing Zen were practically unknown -- which Kerouac in his silliness and word-crafting might have written "unkoan" if only because he liked the sound of it and to drive his editors nuts.

They had editors then. I'm trying to imagine how his editor approached something like "On the Road." I can't quite grasp and the story -- which I'm sure has been told somewhere -- probably isn't all that interesting. You do what you do. But I've seen a posed picture of Kerouac transferring the text of "The Dharma Bums" from scroll to typed pages in standard format. In other words, he didn't just turn in a scroll of teletype paper to Viking or whoever his publisher was; he sat down and typed the whole thing all over again on pages of 8 1/2 x 11 typing paper like any other author and turned in the manuscript for publication just like anybody else looking to be published at the time. It's interesting to me, that part of the process, because the vision I've had is not that. It's a vision of Kerouac defiantly submitting his scroll(s) for publication and daring anybody to do anything about it.

The standard form manuscript of "The Dharma Bums" has been sent around to various literary events and memorials and museums and such, and I think I posted an image of the first page of it previously. The scroll has disappeared. It was sold, apparently, at auction and the buyer was "undisclosed." Wherever it is, and whoever has it, may it be enjoyed.

Jack Kerouac's notebook wherein he declares "The Dharma Bums" complete (clickage will embiggen)

Kerouac says he wrote and finished "The Dharma Bums" in 12 days; it reads very much like that's the case, and I'd say -- but for a purposeful delay to finish reading it -- it took me just about as long to read the novel this time. I have no idea how long it took me to read it when I was a kid, and I suspect, because many parts of it didn't ring a bell this time around and seemed to be all new to me, that I skipped through it back then. That could be my failing memory, too. But I suspect I didn't read it closely in any case, and even this time around, in re-paging through it for this essay and other things, there are whole passages I know I read that I don't remember.

I did delay reading the last two chapters this time around. Purposefully. I knew the story had to end but I didn't want it to end, and so I slowed then stopped reading it. Set the book aside and tried to take in the bloody horrors going on in so many places this horrible summer. The contrast between the vision, Kerouac's vision, I was reading and the reality outside it could not have been stronger. I have some idea what was going on in the country and the world in 1955 and 56 when the novel is set, and neither the world nor the nation were at peace.

Yet somebody on a Dharma path at that time would not have been numbed by the abundance of bloodshed along the way, at least I don't think so. There would have been terrible things, yes (Emmett Till, anyone?) and Kerouac himself mentions passing by Alamogordo and having a vision relating to the Bomb:

From that desert in Arizona he roared on up to New Mexico, took the cut through Las Cruces up to Alamogordo where the atom bomb was first blasted and where I had a strange vision as we drove along seeing in the clouds above the Alamogordo mountains the words as if imprinted in the sky: "This Is the Impossibility of the Existence of Anything" (which was a strange place for that strange true vision) and then he batted on through the beau­tiful Atascadero Indian country in the uphills of New Mexico beautiful green valleys and pines and New England-like roll­ing meadows and then down to Oklahoma (at outside Bowie Arizona we'd had a short nap at dawn, he in the truck, me in my bag in the cold red clay with just stars blazing silence overhead and a distant coyote)...

Breathtaking.  Of course, I quibble. "Atascadero" is a place in California. A well-known place at that. Atascadero is not the name of the Indians who live in the beautiful uphills of New Mexico; he must have been thinking of "Mescalero" -- but does it matter? Even more interesting, this was pre-Interstate Highway, and so I'm wondering the route his truckdriver benefactor Bodhisattva took him through New Mexico on his way to North Carolina because it seems he bypassed Albuquerque. Which was certainly possible to do...

He saw the words as if imprinted on the sky: This Is the Impossibility of the Existence of Anything as he passed near the site of the Trinity blast, which he declared a "strange vision" yet it's perfectly apropos it seems to me.

As I've reported, I've been to Trinity Site itself a couple of times, last April most recently, and I was nearly struck dumb by the stunning display in the skies that day, the clouds dancing and the slashes of virga in many places and the wind blasts, the shafts of sunlight on the sere ground, the subtle illuminations on the mountains. I'd never seen anything like it, I imagined anything like it. The visual image was even more intense than a painting, than a movie, than any description I could try to give. And I was in the midst of it, in the midst of a crowd, and I wondered if any of them could see what I was seeing, and if they could, whether it had the same impact or any impact for that matter.

The blast site itself is on a kind of upslope ledge against and below the mountains, and from this ledge there is the possibility of a sweeping view into the Jornado de los Muertos, the plain below where many are said to have died due to the lack of water for people and animals passing through. There is the possibility of a view because sometimes there will be too much dust or cloud or other stuff in the air to see much of anything below except maybe the mountains in the distance. So you might go out there and feel enclosed rather than exposed to something grander.

But in April, the view was grand. And yes, I digress, but so what?

Desolation Peak Lookout, Mt. Hozomeen in the background. Photograph by: Basil Tsimoyianis; Creative Commons license

This is where Kerouac spent his summer of 1956 after Gary Snyder sailed for Japan. Ray-Jack made it to the top of A Mountain, barely, and he stayed there for his allotted time and then he made his way back down the mountain.

I delayed finishing "The Dharma Bums" because I knew it was coming to an end and I didn't want it to end. It had been an extraordinary journey to that point, and I had a heart-wrenching notion of how it might conclude though I knew -- because Kerouac had already told us -- that Ray-Jack would leave the mountain lookout on Desolation Peak and go back into "the world." That's what a Dharma Bum does, even after being on the mountaintop for 60 days or however long he was there.  

He goes back into the world.

The last few chapters of "The Dharma Bums" are pure poetry, practically decorative yet highly evocative, and as is the case with everything else in the book, exceedingly visual. You are there. I was there. To wit:

(The initial passage of Chapter 34)

August finally came in with a blast that shook my house and augured little augusticity. I made raspberry Jello the color of rubies in the setting sun. Mad raging sunsets poured in seafoams of cloud through unimaginable crags, with every rose tint of hope beyond, I felt just like it, brilliant and bleak beyond words. Everywhere awful ice fields and snow straws; one blade of grass jiggling in the winds of infinity, anchored to a rock. To the east, it was gray; to the north, aw­ful; to the west, raging mad, hard iron fools wrestling in the groomian gloom; to the south, my father's mist. Jack Moun­tain, his thousand-foot rock hat overlooked a hundred football fields of snow. Cinnamon Creek was an eyrie of Scottish fog. Shull lost itself in the Golden Horn of Bleak. My oil lamp burned in infinity. "Poor gentle flesh," I realized, "there is no answer." I didn't know anything any more, I didn't care, and it didn't matter, and suddenly I felt really free. Then would come really freezing mornings, cracking fire, I'd chop wood with my hat on (earmuff cap), and would feel lazy and won­derful indoors, fogged in by icy clouds. Rain, thunder in the mountains, but in front of the stove I read my Western magazines. Everywhere snowy air and woodsmoke. Finally the snow came, in a whirling shroud from Hozomeen by Canada, it came surling my way sending radiant white heralds through which I saw the angel of light peep, and the wind rose, dark low clouds rushed up as out of a forge, Canada was a sea of meaningless mist; it came in a general fanning attack adver­tised by the sing in my stovepipe; it rammed it, to absorb my old blue sky view which had been all thoughtful clouds of gold; far, the rum dum dum of Canadian thunder; and to the south another vaster darker storm closing in like a pincer; but Hozomeen mountain stood there returning the attack with a surl of silence. And nothing could induce the gay golden horizons far northeast where there was no storm, to change places with Desolation. Suddenly a green and rose rainbow shafted right down into Starvation Ridge not three hundred yards away from my door, like a bolt, like a pillar: it came among steaming clouds and orange sun turmoiling.

What is a rainbow, Lord?

A hoop

For the lowly.

Is it any wonder I didn't want it to end?

But it had to, for "The Dharma Bums" is only a novel, no? It had to come to an end, and it the end, though I shed a tear or two, the ending seemed perfect:

"Japhy," I said out loud, "I don't know when we'll meet again or what'll happen in the future, but Desolation, Desolation, I owe so much to Desolation, thank you forever for guiding me to the place where I learned all. Now comes the sadness of com­ing back to cities and I've grown two months older and there's all that humanity of bars and burlesque shows and gritty love, all upsidedown in the void God bless them, but Japhy you and me forever we know, O ever youthful, O ever weeping." Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said "God, I love you" and looked up to the sky and really meant it. "I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other."

To the children and the innocent it's all the same.

And in keeping with Japhy's habit of always getting down on one knee and delivering a little prayer to the camp we left, to the one in the Sierra, and the others in Marin, and the little prayer of gratitude he had delivered to Sean's shack the day he sailed away, as I was hiking down the mountain with my pack I turned and knelt on the trail and said "Thank you, shack."

Yah. How many times have I... ?

Then I added "Blah," with a little grin, because I knew that shack and that mountain would understand what that meant, and turned and went on down the trail back to this world.

The Rucksack Revolution was yet to come. "The Dharma Bums" is a pre-figuring journey through time and space and spirit that blazed the path, though many at the time -- like me -- had no idea it would be so. It was a novel, a Beat novel, like jazz and dancing down a mountain, not meant to do anything at all, just to be.

And so it was.

Kerouac said "The Dharma Bums" was better than "On the Road"

 SUNDAY, DEC 8, 1957 -- Quiet Sunday, my work done -- I think DHARMA BUMS is not as dramatic as On the Road but it's a better book (more important) -- technically almost just as good in any case -- If Viking doesn't want to publish it, they'll be mistaken & sorry later on --

.... 

Wrote Dharma Bums from Nov. 26 to Dec. 7 -- 12 days 

^THE DHARMA BUMS, for me, is better than ON THE ROAD.... in the end... because what Neal was, a mad holy hepcat, wasn't as great as what the dharma bums were, religious heroes of America, preaching kindness and mindfulness (that's what Neal could have been)-- oh well, it probably stinks--------------

"The Dharma Bums" is so pure and clear by comparison to either "On the Road" or "Desolation Angels." And yet... there is a sadness to it. That's part of the Dharma too.

You Can't Fall Off A Mountain

Matterhorn Peak, CA

Now when I went around that ledge that had scared me it was just fun and a lark, I just skipped and jumped and danced along and I had really learned that you can’t fall off a mountain. Whether you can fall off a mountain or not I don’t know, but I had learned that you can’t. 'The Dharma Bums' -- Jack Kerouac

The South Bedroom and the Jesus Room

South Bedroom Alight

Unless we have overnight guests and need a place to put them, we keep the South Bedroom and the Jesus Room shut during the wintertime to save on heating costs and don't open them up unless we need to in the summer time to help keep the rest of the house cool.

Our house is not all that large, but it is large for an adobe pioneer house. It's been added on to at various times by various owners, so it kind of rambles about, with wings and spare rooms and whatnot, and it's not very well insulated among other things, like the finish polished pine floor is also the subfloor in some rooms so sometimes when the wind blows in the winter, the cold air seeps up from below.... There is no central heating or air conditioning, only a large free-standing gas heater in the living room that puts out abundant heat but it's kind of iffy getting said heat well distributed to distant rooms. In fact, we use electric heaters in those distant rooms to supplement the main heater when the temperature falls. There are some portable air conditioners, and we run the one in our bedroom through most of the summer to keep things in there nice and cool for sleepy-time.

The South Bedroom has become another library room; there are books and bookcases in every room in the house except the bathroom, where there are stacks of magazines instead. We picked up two new bookcases at Claudio's in town -- his brother builds them out of scrap lumber and they're very rustic and southwestern and nice -- and we thought that would be enough for the books we planned to put in there, but of course they filled up right away and we had to get another one. A skinny one this time because we were running out of room to put more bookcases. Most of our "good" books are in the South Bedroom, that is the ones that have some special meaning or financial value, the many signed copies, the still nice old ones, and some are kept in a glass fronted bookcase that dates from the 19teens or sometime like that that we brought with us from California. One of those Craftsman pieces that are practically worshiped by subcultures of house restorers. We sometimes stack bookcases on top of one another, so they reach toward the ceiling and we should probably have a ladder handy to get to the books at the very top. Practically every flat surface except the bed has stacks of books as well... We'll need to find some place for another bookcase some day.

Jesus Room Shrine Corner

The Jesus Room also has books: your missals and prayerbooks and catechisms and whatnot but also some cook-books and how-to books and so on, simply because we didn't have room for them in the kitchen and other places.

The Jesus Room also has lots of paintings and religious statues and icons and so forth. Many of the paintings are paint-by-number items that I picked up at thrift stores, and some of them are quite nice examples of the genre. The Gethsemane picture above the shrine is paint-by-number, for example (if that weren't obvious). Other paintings are what you might call "motel-commercial." They're actual paintings and they're technically very well done, but their subject matter is so generic, whether landscapes or marinas or city skylines, that they seem to be cranked out rather than thought through. They were probably originally bought for motel rooms or offices or set up on easels on tourist byways.

There is a stunning photograph, too, of what I think is a Mormon Temple in Hawaii or maybe it's Mesa, Arizona -- very dramatically lit with pinks and golds and a sunset sky -- I just like it, and so it hangs in the corner away from the corner shrine with all the other Jesus (and Mary and St. Francis) stuff. Wouldn't want to cross contaminate... There's a small carving of St. Francis in the shrine that keeps falling down, and I sometimes take that as a "sign," though I'm pretty sure it happens because one of the feral cats that sometimes gets in the house goes exploring the way they do. Cats love to explore. The shrine is like a cave for them. The items on the semi-altar below the shrine also get knocked about from time to time. That's why I think it must be the cats.

There's a pressed tin Our Lady of Lourdes that all the silver has worn off of so you don't really know right off what it is, and then it hits you and it's pretty cool because it is very three-dimensional and serene; There's a huge gold-framed print of The Last Supper that must have come from a church hall somewhere, but I don't know where. Of course there's a photo-print of Our Lady of Guadalupe from her shrine in Mexico. That's her hiding above St. Anthony peeking out behind the door to the shrine in the photo.

Yes, of course, most of the iconography is Catholic, though there are a few overtly Protestant or Mormon or Orthodox items as well. I suppose some of the crosses could be considered "non-denominational" -- though whether they are or not depends on one's point of view. My favorite is the miniature replica of the San Damiano Cross, the one that allegedly spoke to St. Francis in the ruined chapel of San Damiano in Umbria below Assisi, the one that told him "Francis, go, rebuild my house..."

There are "oriental" paintings --*ha ha*-- of the Paint-by-Number kind but nothing, really that be-speaks the Buddhist light behind a lot of this stuff. Except for St. Francis. Who I think must have been a veritable "Dharma Bum." And thus was himself a Buddha.

Nevertheless, we keep the Jesus Room and the South Bedroom shut during the winter and don't open them unless we need to in summer so as to save on heating and cooling costs.

Must be our practical natures.

I'm kind of ticked though because I wanted to go to the Spanish Market at the Santa Fe Plaza today, but I'm too lame and can't really get around for long enough or well enough to make it enjoyable; that and the heat of course. We're having quite a heatwave, the last couple of days in the mid-upper 90s (which is high for here) and it's uncomfortable to be outside, especially if there's little or no shade. It would have been a chance to get together with Nicolas Otero, a remarkably serene santero whose works are beautiful and spiritual and who illustrated several of Rudolpho Anaya's recent children's books -- "How Hollyhocks Came to New Mexico" and such. But not this time. Not today.

We Want the Killing to Stop

It seems like such a simple thing, doesn't it? Stop the killing. Cease fire. Put down your weapons. Take up the cause of... true righteousness.

The killings in Albuquerque -- the recent bludgeoning deaths of two homeless men and the even more recent execution of a fleeing suspect -- have garnered attention in part for their sheer mindlessness and cruelty, especially in the case of the homeless men, but as we learn more about the execution, it becomes clear, there's something deeply foul in the minds of those who set out to assert power over the common herd.

They kill because they want to, first of all; and they kill because they think they're supposed to: the correct path in their minds is Death to the Other. "The Other" being literally anyone in the way of... (their) power.

The three boys who have confessed to killing the two homeless men (both Navajo-Diné) in Albuquerque probably thought they were doing nothing wrong -- if they thought about what they were doing at all. I think we'll find out as the story unfolds that at least two of the boys, and maybe all three, are part Indian themselves, so it cannot be considered a racially motivated crime the way some people are already trying to make it out to be. No, the men they killed were not so much of a different race as they were just different enough to be... threatening. They were homeless, and thus a few rungs farther down the social ladder. They were apparently drunks. But harmless drunks. Their very harmlessness was part of their vulnerability and part of the threat they posed to someone -- in this case, three adolescent boys -- looking to assert their own power. The homeless men hurt no one, they wished ill on no one, and that was part of their weakness and their vulnerability and their threat. The boys who killed them probably saw weakness and vulnerability in the Other as a threat to their own status, one it's possible they only managed to secure -- in their own minds -- through violence and cruelty toward The Other.

And where might they get the idea that violence and cruelty toward the weak, the poor, the homeless, the drunk or the addicted was a way or the way to secure their own status or well-being?

It's not as if they haven't had examples. In Albuquerque, for example, a homeless mentally ill man was summarily executed on a hillside, infamously video-recorded by the killers themselves, then hailed by the police chief as a "justified" shooting-murder-execution. Dozens of individuals have been killed by Albuquerque police in the last few years, but that homicide rate is easily bested by the homicides among the people of Albuquerque with no police involvement. The killing goes on with seeming abandon, and when we try like anything to curb some of it -- that part of it generated by the police, for example -- we're liable to see some horrible murder spree take place that the police took no part in. Except... as examples.

Examples of how to properly treat the mentally ill, the homeless, the drunk, the addicts, and the down and outs among us. If you don't kill them outright, then beat them bloody and drive them away or haul them off somewhere and dump them. If you can, you kill them. Why not? They're just useless space takers anyway.

If this is how the police treat them, under the color of authority, and with the full confidence in all the legal protection the city can provide, then why shouldn't a few teen-age boys who see what's going on do likewise? Why shouldn't they?

We want the killing to stop, but why should it stop when The Powers That Be engage in the very same kind of violence they claim they want to thwart? What is this nonsense? If they are the examples to follow, in some ways it's a wonder there isn't much more violence and cruelty and mayhem than there is.

Those who have the power have for long wielded it irresponsibly and then blame the victims of their irresponsibility for the outcomes.

It's sad and sickening.

We see the same methodology and mindset in almost all the conflicts which seem to be engulfing the world this summer. Irresponsible power-madness, continual victim-blaming, and  endless bloodshed. The destruction of Gaza merely one of numerous similar endeavors by powers and would-be powers who think they're doing what's necessary and what they are supposed to do to assert their status.

We want the killing to stop, and that means we want those who wield power in our world to do so responsibly, and this they refuse to do.

Refuse. Outright. They insist that what they do is right and proper, but anyone who emulates them (without "authorization") gets whacked; anyone who defends themselves against the irresponsibility of their rulers gets whacked; anyone who speaks out against the madness is tracked, and if it looks like they might turn into a threat to power, they are whacked.

We want the killing to stop, and we take what actions we can to monkeywrench the killing machine, but every step forward is countered by what seem like many steps back. When someone like David Correia takes to defending police brutality -- because no gun was unholstered and used -- then we have to wonder, is this the world we envision for the future: as much brutality from the police as they can get away with, so long as no one is shot? Absurd.

No, those who wield power must be brought to consciousness of their responsibility. They've lost any sense of it.

Those who wield power set the example for the rest of society, and when that example is filled with violence, bloodshed, and cruelty, is it any wonder there are so many emulations among those who take their cues from the powerful?

This is a simple -- and too simplistic -- understanding of human nature, but until those in power learn to act with dignity and with justice, as opposed to violence and vengeance, the killing won't stop, it will simply get worse. It's a descent into madness.

We want the killing to stop, but we want more than merely that.

We want to live with dignity and justice, community and peace.

It's not too much to ask and expect.

A Passage

This passage just whapped me up side the head (From "The Dharma Bums" by Jack Kerouac, 1958):

[Japhy and Ray are up in the mountains above Bridgeport, CA, on a hiking adventure, about to make camp for the night. Ray says:

  ...I have a prayer. Did you know the prayer I use?

What?

I sit down and say, and I run all my friends and relatives and enemies one by one in this, without entertaining any angers or gratitudes or anything, and I say, like, "Japhy Ryder, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha," and then I run on and say, "David O. Selznick, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha," though I don't use names like David O. Selznick, just people I know, because when I say the words "equally a coming Buddha" I want to be thinking of their eyes, like you take Morley, his blue eyes behind those glasses, when you think "equally a coming Buddha," you think of those eyes and you really do suddenly see the true secret serenity and the truth of his coming Buddhahood. Then you think of your enemy's eyes.

 Anybody can do it.

Name. Name any name, make up a name, name a group, name your enemies, one by one and in batches, and think and say: ")Name(, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha" and think of those eyes and suddenly see the true secret serenity and the truth of their coming Buddhahood.

Namaste.

"The Dharma Bums"

Clickage will make the image big enough to read the dialog. It's funny.

As something of an antidote to this Blood Summer, I ordered a couple of books from afar (no, I don't use Amazon, these were ordered from Abe Books): "The Dharma Bums" and "On the Road -- the Original Scroll" both by Jack Kerouac -- and they came yesterday. There was a yellow card in my post office box with a whole series of hand-written numbers scratched off, and at the bottom was my box number with a (2) beside it. That's how they let you know you've got to go to the counter and pick something up. They don't actually tell you that, they just leave the yellow card in the post office box, and one day when I was laid up Ms Ché checked the mail in the box and found one of those yellow cards and she didn't know what it was. She thought it was maybe a mistake so she left it there and it stayed there for days. She was expecting a package though, and she said to me that it hadn't come, and she wondered what happened. I said that when there is a package, they'll leave a yellow card sometimes and you have to go to the counter to pick up whatever it is.

"Oh. There was a yellow card in the box the other day. I didn't know what it was, so I left it there. I thought it was a sorting thing or they made a mistake or something."

No, that's how you find out there's a package. So when she went to the post office that day, the card was still there and she took it to the counter, and sure enough, there was her package, waiting.

Yesterday there was a yellow card in the post office box and I took it to the counter and the woman at the counter said, "Good morning, Mister Ché. I see you have a package." and she took the yellow card from me, "No, I see you have two packages! I will be right back." And she disappeared around the corner to where the packages that have arrived are kept. Sure enough, within a few seconds she returned with two bubble packs, looking about book size, and placed them on the counter. "Here they are, Mister Ché. Will there be anything else?" I told her that no, I was fine, and then I dropped a few of the other mail pieces that had been in the box, "except I'm dropping everything this morning." She laughed. "Would you like some stamps?" "No, thank you. I'm fine." As I picked up the things that had fallen on the floor and scooped up the bubble packs from the counter, she said, "Well you have a very nice day, then, and we'll see you next time."

There are times when I've had my differences with the Post Office, like just a few days before, but this was not one of them, and I wished her well. I think her name is Lorene, but I get her confused with Mary who is also quite friendly and well-wishing and they don't wear name tags so I'm not sure which is which. I wished her well as well and went on my way.

When I got home I opened the bubble bags and there were the books, new Penguin editions, large format paperbacks, really quite nice, and they made me smile and then I laughed out loud when I read the cartoons on the end flaps of "The Dharma Bums." I will attempt to scan and add them to this post in due time.

"The Dharma Bums." It was, as far as I can recall, the first Kerouac book I read, but it may have been the second, after "On the Road." One loses track. It was a long time ago. At least 50 years ago. I opened the book yesterday and skipped over the scholarly introductions (imagine "scholarly introductions" to a Jack Kerouac novel fifty years ago!) and went right to the meat and was transported in a sense back to that time fifty or more years ago when I first read it.

And I've been more or less devouring it ever since -- well, except for this break to write something about it. It's an odd sensation because I read the book all those years ago and it made quite an impression on me, but I didn't actually carry it around with me and use it as a kind of talisman or bible or anything, I just read it and said, "Whoa," or maybe "Wow." As I'm reading it now, the words and images and sometimes whole passages are firing off in my memories, "Oh yes, I've been here before..." oh yes. Absolutely. But here's the thing, what Kerouac is writing about, the places at least, are places I have been, or near where I have been, like Berkeley and Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, and climbing in the Sierras and San Francisco and so forth, and North Beach and all of that, I've been there, spent lots of time there, traveling up and down the state of California and eventually traveling into Oregon and Washington, and up into the mountains and getting drunk on cheap wine in San Francisco with friends and talking all about everything far into the night with friends I thought were smarter than me and certainly much more fashionable, some of whom even became famous.

I didn't know anything about Buddhism when I first read "The Dharma Bums," so many of the references and even the title went right over my head, or maybe they entered somehow and germinated there eventually, because as I read it now, I know what most of the Buddhist terms refer to like "Bodhisattva" and so forth, and the various things you do when you're a "Zen Lunatic" and what not. It's all very familiar to me now but I can't imagine I knew anything about it when I was 14 or whatever when I first read the book, so I've been trying to figure out how I might have imagined what all this foreign gobbledegook meant at the time, and I can't do it. It couldn't have meant anything, and yet it must have, because now it all seems just right.

Practically everything seems just right now.

It's surprising and a little bit scary.

I realize I'm writing somewhat in the style of Jack Kerouac right now. It's because his influence is very strong on me and it's a style I've always liked. It's a style that always seemed very real and honest to me, far more so than the styles of so many tamer novelists who make their livings churning out the same thing over and over again that never actually says anything. Kerouac is saying something different and whipping you about this way and that and making you look at things you may never have seen before -- or like me, you may have been seeing or doing them all your life but never actually paid attention. As I re-read "The Dharma Bums" I wonder if he actually had more of an influence on my life than I could even imagine.

No, I say to myself, just because I have been to some of these places, done some of these things, known some of these people -- well, people like them or people who actually knew the people he's writing about  -- it doesn't mean very much in the vaster scheme of things. Everybody could say the same thing, couldn't they? They did and they knew many of the same things some novelist or other did and knew as well, didn't they? We're all related in some way like that, aren't we?

I don't know.

I don't know. And so I'll read some more and see how much more I remember. It was fifty years ago or more after all, and who can remember everything?

One thing I keep thinking about which may not mean anything at all is that Kerouac wrote "the Dharma Bums" in the mid or late 1950s and I read it in the early 1960s and I felt it was very contemporary, that it wasn't about a previous time at all. And I feel the same way about it now, it's not about a previous time or an earlier, safer and saner and more innocent era, it's about right now, today. These things and these people are going on right now, today, in some of the same places, in contrast to the chaos and the bloodfest our rulers are delighting in. Of course it was different then, but it wasn't. Not really.

Another APD Killing

Moments ago. Little news. Suspect dead. ATF and APD attempt to serve a warrant on a fugitive -- they say. Two shots fired.

It has been just about three weeks since the last shooting death of a suspect. Right on schedule...

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Ah yes, "pulled a gun from his waistband" excuse. It's used frequently: the man was a suspect, sometimes even a fugitive, and "he reached into his waistband" they said to pull out a gun. He needed killing. And so it would be. Pop-pop. Dead. Besides, he had a long criminal record and was wanted for something, in this case: parole violation.  Strangely, inexplicably, in this case, ATF was trying to serve a warrant.

Wouldn't be surprised if the "weapon" in his "waistband" was a cell-phone, but maybe they'll find something scary like a cap gun or even a BB gun. That, as we know, is a sure death sentence. Or maybe there was no "gun" at all, the cops just thought there was one.

So sick of this shit.

 

Gaza (Death From Above) Live

The sounds of drones and explosions are constant though you may not see anything but flares in the night sky...



Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream