The UnTexan

INK: WORDS, ROCKS, TIME

Here's how Norman Maclean ended A River Runs Through It, one of the finest books I ever read:

"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

"I am haunted by waters."

I figure all old men are haunted by one thing or another. My father has his war. Norman Maclean had his water. I am haunted by ink. Words. Words on paper. I like the way printed words look. I like the way they smell. Printed words swimming in a murky river of ink. I spent years as a journalist. That was easy because the words most always drifted downstream with the current. But I have written other things too, stories of my own making, words that have ended up in books and those words often seemed to be pushing upstream against the current. They are difficult words to catch. Someone suggested to me recently that I have used my natural ease with journalism to escape the tough writing I should have been doing all these years. And maybe he is right. But Norman Maclean was a lucky man, finding words under rocks like that; it doesn't work that way for me. When I reach into the inky depths and turn over the rocks I know I must turn over, the words often swim away from me, upstream, into the murk. But I wade after them because I cannot stop. It is the fate and the vocation of a man obsessed with turning over rocks and looking for words. Sometimes I catch some of them and sometimes I have nothing to show for it. Either way it is very hard work. But I am haunted by ink.

Perhaps that helps explain my new tattoo. Perhaps not.

________________________________________

Speaking of ink, Rhonda, my friend of more than a decade whom I have never met in person, wrote about my tattoo and other things on her blog today. Ours is a virtual friendship built entirely out of words over time. There is probably a pretty good book hidden away in the reams of emails we have exchanged over the years.

MY BIRTHDAY, MY TATTOO

Today is my birthday. And I have a new tattoo. Actually it is my first tattoo.It was a gift from my wife. It looks great. And I don't have to worry about how it will look when I get older. I am older. My mother
always told me that only trashy people had tattoos, but she said lots of things that have not turned out
to be true. And so far I have not detected any urges to engage in trashy behavior or go live in a trailer park. In fact, the only urge I have felt so far is the urge to get another tattoo.

Why a wheelbarrow? Because of this poem by William Carlos Williams called "The Red Wheelbarrow" that first appeared under the title "XXII" in a book called Spring and All. The book and the poem changed lots of things for me and have remained important for many years. I think anyone who wants to write should read Spring and All. Here is the poem:

"so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens."

It is what it is, just like my tattoo.

WHY PORTLAND IS PORTLAND AND AUSTIN ISN'T

Austin will never be Portland no matter how many tattooed geeks, techies and Asian engineers move here. Portland is a smart place to live. It has trains and brains and bike lanes. Austin's not smart enough to overcome its greedy, strip-developing, lethal-injecting, pickup-driving, traffic-jamming Texas heart and none of the Austin cheerleaders and Austin boosters can shovel enough shit to cover that up. It is what it is and it ain't what it ain't.

Which is what makes this little tale so heartwarming:

My neighborhood's community email has been hopping. Folks have been in a tizzy the past few days over a low-flying cop helicopter. Of course, it doesn't take anything more than a couple of black guys fishing in the local pond to get people tizzy-fied and emailing about the imagined horrors of urban crime and dark invaders with evil intentions (someone who saw the guys fishing said she suspected they were selling drugs because one of them kept talking on his cell phone and she called the police even though she had no idea what the guy was talking about; a black neighbor sent out an email saying it seemed like the neighborhood hasn't changed much in the 20-plus years he has been here and that "fishing while black" -- in fact, doing anything while black -- still seemed to be enough of a crime for neighbors to bring the cops down on a man's ass. But many a proud Austinite's lily white breast hides a dark and racist heart; it comes with the territory, just like the pickup driving and lethal injecting and that last little bit of the Old South that J. Frank Dobie couldn't bury with cowboy talk). So, for a couple of days, the angsty emails have been flying and dark and violent urban fantasies growing around that cop chopper that was flying so low.

Well, here's what happened (directly from the email traffic): "OK! So, There were two individuals stealing livestock... one was detained. Then the other was found and both transported to jail. They were stealing goats and the goats were already loaded in the truck. So the police were just in time! And they got the bad guys!! I hope the bad guys have to pay for the hours worth of helicoptor fuel, etc."

And this was almost in the shadow of the highest tech Samsung factory at the edge of town.

Now if I happened to be the police reporter at the local newspaper, I would make a special effort to write about those goat rustlers just to give Austinites a little perspective about the past they cannot escape no matter how much they twitter and tweet. But the newspaper won't do that. The American-Statesman is not in the perspective business, it is in the cheerleader business. The Austin Chronicle is just about as bad, with overlong stories in little-bitty type. And if you give folks a real glimpse of themselves, the whole damned thing might fall apart. Austin is dreaming hipster dreams. It can't afford nightmares about goat rustlers.

LOSING MY RELIGION?

I have a virus. It's not swine flu, but it is something that saps my energy and makes my head and knees hurt. Yesterday I woke up already wanting to go back to bed. I went to the office instead. I did not have to go to my office, didn't particularly want to go, but I needed to go. I needed the comfort of the walls, windows, desk and door because viruses are viruses, but something else has hold of my soul lately and won't let go. Or perhaps it is something that is losing its grip on my soul and is clawing desperately trying not to slip away. Language has always saved me, set me free or at least set things straight for me, but words are harder to come by lately and they sometimes fail me completely. And when the words fail, the sentences break and whole structures creak and then collapse. On the days when I need a box to put the broken pieces of my salvation in, I go downtown to my office, because when words fail me, I need the walls, windows, desk and door. I need a job. I need an architecture I understand.

MARY TRAVERS: I WAS ONLY PASSING THROUGH

I am sitting here listening to music I told myself I outgrew a long time ago. I first came across Peter, Paul and Mary when I was on my way to Bob Dylan but didn't know where I was going. They made a wonderful noise together. What was more important was that they made a meaningful noise together, fitting their voices together around the words in an old harmony I could understand. And that is what I was after - meaningful noise. It was 1962-63 and the times were changing sure enough and I was 17 years old and in need of something to believe in. I could feel it and when I listened to Peter, Paul and Mary - especially Mary - I heard it too. Mary Travers. There was nothing like her at my high school; the girls there were too tidy to be sexy with their Peter Pan collars, virgin pins and Capezio flats. They were thin-lipped southern women in the making. I could already see it in their faces. But Mary Travers was from New York City. Mary Travers had that long blond hair, those bangs, that voice. She made folk music sexy, especially for those of us who were not quite sure what we were listening to or why, and were nowhere near ready to hear Bob Dylan sing his own songs. She was a sexy woman making a meaningful noise. She seemed like everything I wanted in a woman, the kind of woman who would want a man like me. When I met her (backstage after a show though a cousin of a friend of a friend whose other cousin played bass for Peter, Paul and Mary if I remember it correctly) she was - frighteningly - a woman. And I was only a babbling boy in front of her. Not long after that I "outgrew" Peter, Paul and Mary, found Bob Dylan and abandoned prim and thin-lipped girls with Peter Pan collars and virgin pins. Mary Travers died Sept. 16. She helped me get past harmony and get on with my life.

ALICIA PARLETTE INFO

For those who come here seeking Alicia Parlette, and there are many of you, here is a little something that came in over the virtual transom: Alicia news. It is almost as good as hearing from Alicia herself.

THE TEXANTHROPE

I always wondered why Davy Crockett liked Texas so much. It turns out he left Tennessee on Oct. 31, 1835, swore his allegiance to Texas in January 1836 and died a couple of months later, March 6, 1836.  It turns out he wasn't here long enough to matter. He wasn't in Texas six months before he died (some people might consider that a lucky break) but I'll bet he had plenty of time looking over the Alamo wall at all those Mexicans and first wondering where the hell they all came from (subsequent generations of Texans have had a similar response) and then wondering why he came. Maybe it was the last thing that passed through his mind as the Mexicans were killing him in a language he couldn't understand: "Why in the hell am I here?" The answer: It seemed like a good idea at the time. That happens to lots of people. It happened to us.

After all this time in Austin, my wife and I are just about to arrive in Texas or just about to begin leaving. I would like to think it is a toss-up, but probably not.

I have been battling Texas since our arrival -- for more than seven years. Now it appears Texas is winning. Or perhaps it has won already. Or the toss has been lost. At any rate, I feel tired, defeated and destined to spend the foreseeable future here. My wife and I came to Texas for the best of reasons (my wife's Texas-paid-for ph.d.) and the UnTexan was born out a mostly lighthearted, jesting disregard for a place he knew he would be leaving in a few years (four years at the most). Now we are three years past that and we have stayed for the worst of reasons (job, money, stuff, inertia, exhaustion, depression, fear, failure of imagination, more stuff, more money, more inertia or more fear or more exhaustion or less imagination, whatever) and over those "extra" years the UnTexan's lighthearted jesting has been drained of its lightheartedness. In fact, the UnTexan is well on the way to becoming the Texanthrope. We have stayed too long. We might not be leaving. She wants to stay longer. I am ill-prepared. Things have turned serious.

How does a man begin to survive such a place? Davy Crockett's no help; if he taught us anything it is that Texas will kill you.

First, I must remind myself that I am with my wife, not in Texas. Wife. Texas. Two distinctly different things. Looking at things this way has seen me through so far. And henceforth, I also will count on two documents to see me through to the end: 1) A Passport, which at least offers the illusion that I can leave though it seems more and more likely I never will; and 2) My Last Will and Testament, which will insist that my remains never be buried, spread, entombed or otherwise disposed of on or in Texas soil (unless they are with those of my wife because then I would remain with her, not in Texas). Remember that part of Lonesome Dove where Gus made his old friend Call haul his corpse all the way back to Texas in a buckboard? Now start after they arrived in Texas and run the film backwards and you will see what has to happen with me. I will insist on it. I'm sure it's something Gus would understand. One man's Texas is another man's unTexas. And it will be in writing. Gus understood that too.

My wife, my passport and my will. It's so simple. It's so complicated. It is the best I can do, at least for now. Texas is big; Texas looms large for us. And here we are like weary children on a long journey in a hot car who ask repeatedly and monotonously from the confines of the car's backseat, "Are we there yet? Are we there yet," and receive no answer. Still we can't stop asking. "When will we get there?"

"Have we left yet?"

Will it be soon?

IT'S WOODSTOCK WEAK

Joni Mitchell said, "By the time we got to Woodstock we were half-a-million strong." I once published a short story in which the main character said of himself, his wife and most of the people they knew, "By the time we got to Woodstock, it was a movie." And face it, it was. That was made clear to me early on, when I attended a rock festival in Georgia and many of my fellow festival goers were already acting out Woodstock - the movie - rather than having their own good time. In a moment of clarity in my smoky haze, I remember watching them play Woodstock (mud wallowing was very popular at the time) and thinking what a sad commentary on the unoriginality of American youth that was, ignoring the fact that I was there among them. It was "Woodstock Lite" and it probably would have seemed more pathetic than it did, but I was too far gone for subtlety and nuance most of the four days I was there. Nowadays I am so overwhelmed by subtlety and nuance that I would like to get on the magic bus and head for the old fog of Woodstock. But it is a place most of us have never been, and, face it, a place we can no longer go.

Woodstock is 40 years old this week. Television will remind us. New CDs of old music are being released. The dead are being hauled out and counted. Everywhere there is talk of the "Woodstock Nation." People speak of it with fondness. But remember how we were never going to end up like our parents? Listen to the nostalgic voices of the Woodstock Nation, 40 years on. Our fathers and mothers talked about World War and the Great Depression just like that. Can you hear it?

IN THE TOILET

This morning the toilet in our "guest" bathroom clogged. Luckily we don't have any guests. Once it clogged when we did have guests and guest shit creates its own kind of problems. But this house was built in 1959 and sits on a concrete slab. It has developed a few plumbing problems. This morning it was one of those "I've flushed it but it won't go down" problems. No spillage, no leakage, no brown water gurgling up in the bathtub. I went to the garage, grabbed my plunger and my bucket, walked back to the bathroom and took a seat on the edge of the bathtub. I plunged. The water level dropped, but that's it. I plunged again, forcing the water down; when there was room for it, I dumped a bucket of hot water into the toilet. It stayed there. I plunged it down. Dumped in another bucket. Plunged. Finally, there was that satisfying sucking sound of water rushing down the pipes. I flushed. The toilet works again. Then, as I carried my bucket and my plunger back to the garage, I realized unclogging that toilet is likely to be the most satisfying thing I will do today. When I told my wife my sad little epiphany, I expected that little another-epiphany laugh she laughs. Instead, she said, "I was just thinking the same thing." It's not easy to laugh at a thing like that.

ANTHROPOMORPHIC MISANTHROPISM: NO MORE MR. NICE GUY

I have read comic strips my entire life and do not understand people who don't. These days I love the comic strip Pearls Before Swine in particular. I need my Pearls and I need my coffee before I go to work in the morning. I need them even if I am not going to work. They both make me feel better. The strip is full of sweet, kind, smart, and stupid characters. There is an "Angry Bob"; there is even a duck that is prone to excessive violence. But it is "Rat" who is at the center of things, who makes my day with his anthropomorphic misanthropism -- and puts a Rat's distance between me and my own misanthropic and cynical self. These days Rat is busying himself sprinkling schadenfreude on the heads and hopes of others. He once spent time consigning others to a Box O' Stupid People. He also has hit people (he knows they deserve it, that is never an issue) upside the head with various objects. My wife made me one of those and George W. Bush is there to this day. I even keep a collection of Pearls strips on my nightstand to put me in the proper mood before I go to sleep. Comics are good adult company (they are not for children). They make me a better man; at least they make me appear to be a better man. Sometimes people even mistake me for Mr. Nice Guy. Rat doesn't even have to pretend.

Pogo, Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County all have kept me company at one time or another. One of them is living on borrowed time, the rest live on the Internet.