Conrad Bishop's Blog, page 21

Salt Point / / /

—From CB—

Sunday we opted out. For the day, at least. No news, no email, not even plucking a weed from the vast half acre of our existence. The wars will go on, people will shoot each other, the President will go to the can, major criminals will enjoy a cook-out, but we won’t be there. It’s their loss, not ours. We went camping.

We’ve spent many nights under canvas. Our first trip to Europe in 1969— except for a week in a London B&B, four days in an Irish castle, and one overnight in a Polish hotel—we were three months in a pup tent. Same the next year, and other years thereafter. In the States, lots of festivals, odd weekends here and there, and since coming to California the destination has usually been Salt Point.

It’s a state park and campground on the coast about two hours north. We stoked the cats with plenty of water & food, explained that we’d be coming back and they could babysit each other for 24 hours. We took a picnic lunch for the seashore and Cornish hens for supper, a roomier tent than in the early days, and of course my iPad—I could let go my oversight of U.S. foreign policy but not my rewrite of Chapter 22.

In fact I never touched Chapter 22—the world will have to wait. The trees, the sky, and the waves crashing, sending their spray high above the rocks—well, I took some stunning action photos but got impressive images of my thumb.

  But it’s not the photos we go for, it’s the presence of the ocean itself: twenty feet away as we eat picnic and stare, a few hundred yards away as we sleep. It’s being in the presence of the womb. Not a warm, motherly womb, but a birthgiving tumult of unimaginable force—so frightful in its healing roar. Takes me back, for a moment, to a line in Chapter 22, in fact: “that moment when you squeeze out of the birth canal and get the fluorescents full blast and think, Oh crap, now I’m in for it.”

  And we’re always IN FOR IT, always have been. We go back to the news, the cavortings in high public office, the bombs falling, the daily grind, the multifarious hemorrhoids of life. But it doesn’t take much—just an afternoon and a night—to remind me of the inexorable and blessed tide of life.

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Gated!

—From EF—

Our cats are quarantined.

Maybe not the right word. (Segregated? Gerrymandered? Red-lined?) Whatever, our bedroom is upstairs and we don’t want them bouncing on our bed. Unfortunately, in our house there was no door to the stairway, so when we got kittens I had to make one. The stair construction didn’t make that easy, but that never stopped me. I built what was more or less the bottom half of a Dutch door and for a while that was adequate. It didn’t have a latch; it fit in its frame snugly and that was enough.

Not for long. They are brother litter-mates, but Shadow is slim, soft and fluffy, and Garfunkel is a big fireplug with a bulldog butt. As they grew, two things worked to make the gate obsolete. Shadow, intense and lightweight, eventually leaped entirely over the damn thing, and Garfy could snake his paw into the corner and wrench it open. More carpentry.

A second higher plywood panel was added, which took care of Shadow, but latches were required to defeat Garfy. Now there is a little barrel-bolt on both the inside and outside. When we retire for the night, the inner latch is closed. At first this resulted in banging, rattling, and howling, but in time they grew philosophical and more cunning. Shadow is the sneak expert; you can swear he’s nowhere near but as soon as you open the gate on the way up he’s streaked through and stands there on the landing, laughing and preparing to bolt the rest of the way up and get under the bed. We have developed strategies to deal with this.

It also takes craft for a human to come down through the gate. I used to be a night person, but gradually that has shifted. Now I’m lucky if I sleep until 6 AM; Conrad’s alarm is set for 7:30. I have grown to love seeing the golden dawn, and mourned the days when the smoke made it invisible. When I come downstairs, I unlatch the inner bolt, open the gate just enough to wriggle my foot through, and sweep Shadow to one side. Bam, I’m through, close the gate, and bolt it from the downstairs side. Replenish kibble, change water, de-turd the cat pan, skim online news (not unlike the cat pan). Then when Conrad comes down the stairs, he halts and yells “Yo!” and I come let him out.

I always find this funny for a moment, which is sweet—letting your man out of his kennel—then when the bolt is closed again we have the long, long full-body close embrace that begins our day together. There’s a traditional Native American morning prayer—”Thank you for this beautiful red day you have given us, and thank you for our lives”—and mine is a variant. “Thank you for another day that we can have together.” I don’t know what the cats think.

I used to wonder what they did with the whole downstairs at their mercy all night. After all, cats are nocturnal. One night I was not only sleepless but twisty-turny and came downstairs to sleep on the couch. I found out what the cats do: not a damn thing.

They are philosophical about their quarantine, knowing it comes to an end. May we all take comfort from this.

—###—

Age . . .

—From CB—

This is a peculiar age to be passing through. My dad never made it this far; my mom had seven more years, dying at 85. You know you’re in the last act, but you don’t know how long it’ll go or how the playwright will end it: a gunshot, a curtain descending gently, or a messenger saying Godot will come at last. Being a playwright yourself, you know that feeling of having written yourself into a corner—a not-uncommon life experience—but with writing you can rewrite, whereas life is less forgiving.

I’ve faced the keyboard—whether manual, electric, or digital—since the middle of high school, churning out term papers, dissertation, countless plays, grant applications and press releases. Now, short stories and novels. My term papers were read by one person—the prof—and the dissertation by maybe half a dozen. Some of the plays had large audiences, some not, but they all gave us collaborators, tribe, community. Now, it’s back to the handful, mainly friends from previous lives. At each bus stop, a few get off.

Themes common with others my age: I don’t sleep as well. I can’t fish up names when I want to. I have to make an effort not to be prickly on the Web, though I’m generally mellow. Lovemaking gets penciled in on the calendar rather than depending on impulse. I startle to realize that our kids are in their forties. I spend too much on dentistry, and my shape changes a bit each year despite my efforts. My days have a sameness that I sometimes welcome, sometimes don’t.

The invisibility that accompanies age in our culture doesn’t bother me that much, as I’ve felt invisible pretty much since the age of fifteen. I miss directing a lot, performing a bit less, and my choice of writing prose fiction has meant putting myself back in kindergarten with scant possibility of parole. Perhaps the greatest curse of being a sentient 78 is having a clear perspective on how much you don’t know and never will.

I have to admit to a pinch in the gut every time I hear the phrase “old white men” or a snotty dig at “boomers,” or for that matter snotty digs in general, unless they’re funny. I don’t like songs where the lyrics are drowned in heavy molasses or banging on a can. I’m pretty much resigned to the fact that my obituary won’t make the NY Times or even the local daily. More and more, the world seems to me a surreal mishmash: the Three Stooges meet Rambo, with occasional hints of springtime.

Some of these things are natural, others culture-determined, others marks of my peculiarity. I have the enormous blessings of comfort, health, a lifemate, and not presently living in a war zone—in contrast to multitudes of creatures of all species. And I’ve always been in the grip of compulsions I find fulfilling.

What’s to come? Being human, death is a probability, though it’s not on my schedule. What does concern me, seriously, is the old Boy Scout maxim—I was an Eagle Scout—of leaving your campsite cleaner than you found it. Besides the accumulated tchotchkes of 60 years of marriage, I’ve got dozens of show videos, audio files of our 3 radio series, 18 large bins of puppets, 40 playscripts, 200 sketches, 8 novels, 40 short stories, countless photos, two cats—things just got outta hand. And I continue adding stuff to the array.

My other fear about death—besides pain—is the fact that all kinds of things will go on happening when I’m not there. You’re invited to the party, you’ve had a pretty good time, but the party moves on without telling you where.

So I’ll party while I can.

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Seven . . .

—From EF—

This is our violent Seven.

When we were writing our joint memoir Co-Creation: Fifty Years in the Making, we looked at the parade of years and realized that every seven years we had hit a node of change. Something had to be released, and something new had to be incorporated. This one is shaping up to be a stunner, but it’s right on time.

We’ve begun, for obvious reasons, to start talking about what if. What if the fires come close and we have to evacuate, and what if the fire actually were to take our home. It’s already happened to two families we know well, and to countless others in our area. Nobody’s exempt.

We’re being meticulous about masking and distancing and hand-washing and staying home except for necessary provisioning, but what if? I’m eighty, Conrad’s not far behind, we’re in a vulnerable cohort. If either of us were to survive an infection, would life still be something we could recognize?

And then, of course, there’s the elephant in the room: the election. Already there’s a ginning-up of incitement to violence, no matter which outcome. Could we live under four more years? And what are our options? It took us thirty-three years to get back to California, and we live in a little local paradise. A lot of our life-energy comes from where we are. Our creativity is based in the English language; we adore Italy and our daughter, but we’d be unmoored and rootless.

So there it is, the looming Seven. What are we prepared to change? All the past letting-go experiences have been painful, but the new growth has always been something we embrace with a full heart. Why would this be different? I can’t say I’m not apprehensive, but we’re doing what we can to stay light on our feet. We’ve danced this dance before, but this time the music is more Wagnerian. “One step ahead of the shoe shine, two steps away from the county line”—it sounds different with heavy brass and kettle-drums, but maybe we can dance to it anyway.  

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Dog . . .

—From CB—

A friend pointed out the obvious: the rage factor on the Web is a pandemic. I hesitate to launch a scientific study, fearing the consequences, so this is only in the nature of a thought experiment. Imagine that some poor soul ventures a Facebook post with a single word:

DOG

Besides 42 Likes, 16 Loves, 6 Laughs, 5 Griefs, a variety of perplexing emoji’s, and a number of photos of dogs, there are these:

Why not just go ahead and use the n-word? You casually skim over 5,000 years of canine enslavement that goes unrecognized by neo-Liberalism.


YO TRUMP!
Who are you calling a dog, asshole? Stand up and own it!
What about cats? I’ve never read a more homophobic, cis-gendered, heteronormative, ableist, white male supremacist statement. Yes, the cosy middle-class sit-com picture: this old smelly animal curled at Daddy’s feet, with all that that implies.
FUCK BIDEN!
FUCK TRUMP!
“Dog” is a dehumanizing term. They are feeling creatures. Just take a minute out of your self-centered day and look in their eyes.
Dog is making God into an anagram.
It’s not an anagram, it’s a palindrome.
Is.
Is not.
Just because he humps Aunt Ethel’s leg is no reason to mutilate his nature.
Who says he’s male? Are dogs always male? He might be a bitch.
Thanks for this enlightened hate speech.
It’s a semordnilap.
???
God and dog.
This brings up the horrible moment in Sunday School when they said that dogs didn’t have souls so they couldn’t go to Heaven. That finished Sunday School for me. Religion is crap.


I hope you never feel the pain of having to put Ragsie down. Your thoughtless note ripped open a wound that’s been there for twenty years.
You sound pretty fucked-up.
You sound pretty stupid.
YO AOC!
I can’t stand her.
White fragility, anyone?


What about the 2nd Amendment?
“Dog” implies there’s one kind of dog. What do an Alaskan malamute and a chihuahua have in common? They’re two different races. Trying to wipe out “difference” is just a subtle form of racism.
Racist is racist.
???
Racism is not relevant in the world of dogs. They’re all equally oppressed.
I wouldn’t mind being as oppressed as Buddy. Free food, lays on the carpet all day, gets up to poop.
Like the current POTUS.
Libtard!
Redneck!
Socialist!
Bassoonist!
What I hate about bicycles, they’re fine if they had their own roads, but you get behind one, they don’t move over, they just poke along and you never know what to expect.
I’m outta here.

#

After some consideration, I don’t think I want to try this.

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Fizz . . .

—From EF—

Are you old enough to remember pop rocks? The candy that suddenly popped and fizzed in your mouth? It wasn’t around for very long, but it was an intriguing idea. You put something sweet in your mouth, and it went off and did its own thing. For me, that’s what poetry does.

We belong to an oral tradition poetry group that used to meet in a tightly-packed crowd in a private living room four or five times a year to spend about three hours (with a break) listening to each other share poetry from memory. That was the only rule: no reading, you must have taken it into your body and mind before sharing. Now some of us are meeting in the open air in a circle of benches adjacent to a lovely country church, and we’re doing it every two weeks. It’s soul food.

I know a lot of people think poetry’s not for them, but it makes a difference when it’s something you hear spoken from the heart, not find silent on a page. For one thing, it takes a little longer. It allows the time for popping and fizzing, and it’s also graced by the essential pheromones of each speaker. No, you’re not close enough to smell them, but that’s the effect.

Sometimes what’s spoken is something new to you, and that’s its own fizz. And sometimes it’s something nearly everyone already knows, and there’s that special whump when the first words land and you know what’s coming. When I hear “I went out to the hazel wood,” tears spring into my eyes, because I know where we’re going: “The silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun.” And the time it takes to get there is filled with the extra savor of those well-known words, spoken by someone who loves them enough to share.

Or this: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold . . .” It is rushing and tumbling toward the time we are in now, and there is something both painful and comforting that it was seen so clearly a hundred and one years ago. Painful, because it feels true, and comforting, because we are still here to try to learn to see.

Nowadays it’s seen in live concerts when a singer hits the first notes of the crowd’s favorite: everybody erupts in a yell because they know what they’re about to hear, and they really want it. It must be baked into us from the times when we gathered around the fire to hear the bard sing. It creates an instant circle of high-amperage connection.

Today, hate is doing this. It’s good to remember that it’s not the only thing that does.

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A One-Hoss Shay . . .

—From CB—

Without thinking much of it, I’ve tended toward brand loyalty. We’ve been Mac owners since the first 64k. I can’t pass a pub that advertises draught Guinness without a stop. I’ve been with various models of Elizabeth Fuller for nearly sixty years—always a bit of a challenge, but never fails in the clutch. That would be the subject of a book, has been in fact, but this week I want to talk about Dodge vans.

Not the most appealing subject, but a significant part of our lives. We’ve owned four, not counting the first with Theatre X, 1970-74, rehabilitated by a company actor with mechanical expertise. It carried the company and an infant Eli from Milwaukee to Boston, subsequently all over the Midwest. Discomfort aplenty, but it got the job done.

When we formed The Independent Eye, almost all our work was duo touring, and very soon we had a two-year-old and another infant, with another Dodge Maxivan. Elizabeth rebuilt the interior, with an 18-inch platform in back to allow sleeping space above, prop storage below. These were the days before mandatory children’s seats, so our family bounced around within it.

Over the years I’ve lost track of how long we had what. There was a two-tone van, a copper van, a blue van, and they took us to 38 states—no, not quite, as on far-west gigs we flew. Most nights, sponsors lodged us in private homes, but there were nights like an Iowa community college, where the sponsor had failed to secure lodging and was nowhere to be found. We sacked out in the van in the college parking lot. Not sure what we did about peeing.

And I can’t recall the circumstances of their demise. As sad as it is, you can bury cats, but a van is more of a challenge. The only one I distinctly recall is the one we sold to a farmer who intended to haul potatoes. I’d have preferred to keep it within the arts, but I approve of potatoes.

Since moving to California, our touring has been limited to one tour a year, and we’ve built shows to pack into the back of our Prius. The difference between 15 mpg and 40 mpg is significant, and it’s worked okay. But we still have Sheba Big-butt—we can’t refrain from naming them all.

Sheba’s on her last legs. One of these days she won’t pass her emissions test, and that’ll be that. (One of these days, of course, neither will I.) Her main function in recent years has been an inglorious one: hauling trash to the dump. And yet . . .

Right now she’s sitting in our driveway. She’s poised for evacuation from the California fires. She’s packed with cooking and camping gear, some of our electronics, clothing, food, water, and pee pot. She’s actually quite elegant indoors, thanks to a Berber rug in the back and improvised purple curtains that give it the feel of a Turkish bordello. (I’m only surmising that.) If the order comes, one of us will drive the Prius, the other the van. The cats will inhabit the van. They won’t much like it, but we’ll explain that we’ve lived there for hundreds of thousands of miles.

We all have our functions, and eventually we fall apart. An old poem from grade-school English class comes back: “The One-Hoss Shay.” A horse carriage is so well-built that it lasts through generations, presumably cycling through multiple horses, until at last it falls apart in one instant crash. So should Sheba. So should we.

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Why? Why? Why?

—From EF—

I seem to be starving myself again. Not an idiotic weight-loss program, although I am very happy to have lost about six pounds in the last couple of months, even without going to the gym. No, it’s the process of denying myself the things that would most please me.

I battle this all the time, but it goes in cycles. I suspect that this current bummer is in some way fueled by what’s being dredged up by the memoir, and certainly is exacerbated by the fuckery of dirty politics. But I’m damned tired of fighting this again and again and I think it’s time to go into ritual space and do something about it. I just did the math and yeah, it was about twenty-one years ago that I devised a series of rituals to reclaim and repair my damaged self, one chakra at a time. Sevens are a big part of my life pattern, so I pay attention.

What am I talking about? I’m talking about the days when I have to practically put a gun to my head to go upstairs and wash my face and brush my teeth. Such simple things, and I love how it feels to do them. I’m talking about my beloved garlic crop that’s been drying too long in the hot garage, and the weeks when I’ve walked past and haven’t done anything. I’m talking about my overgrown wine-barrels of fresh herbs that should have been harvested and dried weeks ago so I could relish them in my cooking. I’m talking about washing my hair. I’m talking about taking my vitamins. These are all things I could do and they would give me pleasure. I have the time, I have the will, and something in me is standing in the way.

In these quiet focused stay-at-home hours I’ve been mulling this. What’s the common dynamic? I want this, I could have it; I don’t deserve it, so I can’t have it. I have internalized my own inner punitive parent, elected it, and logic isn’t working. Time to remember: when the damage wasn’t logical, don’t try to use logic to heal it. I’ve been part of more than one very effective ritual healing circle; now I need to be my own healer.

When I was a kid I didn’t belong to anything. I was adopted, and my mother was nearly fifty at the time. My parents were executive-class living in a farm community, and I didn’t know anybody my own age except in school, where I was a freak. I was given everything and deserved nothing. Having been told over and over again that I didn’t know how to love, I got the message.

That was then, this is now. The time is ripe. We have a beautiful home, spacious and green, we have each other, we have quiet and privacy and all the time in the world. Now is the time for me to teach myself to love that frightened lonely child at my core, to invoke my own fierce mother-energy to protect that child, to give her what she needs, to make her feel she deserves whatever gives her comfort and pleasure. I have the same strong partner I’ve had for nearly sixty years. Now is the time.

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Writing & Writing & Writing . . .

—From CB—

Multiple workings this week. We’re in chapter 10, 4th draft of a new novel, making slow progress. I sent out queries for our last two, got one expression of interest from a publisher I think is a shyster. Started a free online writing course, more like a writers’ circle, and did a rewrite on an unpublished short story as my first submission. Sent responses to two friends on drafts of their playscripts and did my best not to respond to multiple posts on Facebook. And wrote this week’s Sunday blog on Monday.

And continuing to struggle with poems. There’s a local poetry salon, 15 to 40 people, that’s run like a Quaker meeting, people rising at random to share a favorite poem or sometimes one of their own. Now it’s outdoors and distanced. I’ve started a series of poems drawn from my year as a child in South Dakota, recited one a couple of weeks ago, preparing another. I’ve had spasms of writing poems but never found a voice. My work for stage and page has always been “in character,” very indirectly expressive of what passes for my soul, but with these I may be finding a character in myself. Fairly terrified, but feel something’s pressing to emerge.

Meantime, Elizabeth is plunged into work on her memoir. Covers much the same span as our 2011 memoir but finding her own story to tell and adding a new decade. With luck and a good tomato crop, she’ll have the first draft by Christmas. I read and encourage and provoke, as she does with me.

We have the advantage, for the first time in our lives, to have sufficient time and money. We have the disadvantage of being 78 and 80, learning a new art form as the world slams its doors. The blessing of not having to go on the road; the curse of being hog-tied by the plague.

But we’ll stand in line in the heat of the sun and pay full fare for this very short ride on the roller-coaster.

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Cat Pans . . .

—From EF—

We have house cats. House cats use cat pans. Every morning, early enough to see the glory of the rising sun, I leave Conrad to sleep another hour and come downstairs to start my day. At the foot of the stairs I unlatch the gate that keeps the cats from coming up to bounce on our bed, say hello to the sweet beasts, and hope that I can close the gate before one of them sneaks through. Then I head to the laundry room to take care of the cat pan. I will do this again before going to bed; it’s a regular ritual.

In its way, it’s a lot easier than the diaper ritual was. Modern litter makes it easy: shake the pan and the turds rise to the top. I wish our political system were so efficient. Actually, what I really wish is that we had a better turd patrol. These days it looks as if we can clearly see the offending objects but we don’t have an effective scooper. I paid more for mine than for the plastic ones, because the salesperson said, “Get this and it’s the only one you’ll ever have to get.” He was right.

Today we have a cat pan that the founding fathers never envisioned. We do have a scooper, but it is in the hands of those who do not wish to be scooped. Imagine that: “No, go over there and get that one. I’m above the law.” Meanwhile, the level in the pan rises and the stink increases. Would you put up with that?

Day by day the documented events hit the news, and day by day there seems to be nothing to do about it. It seems that we do have a Constitution, or at least we did, and day by day we see violations that would warrant the attention of the law. Nothing happens.

Hey dudes, you must have bought the cheap plastic scoopers that break easily. This pan is overflowing and smelling pretty rank. Could you invest a little more and get something that works?

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