Also, it's cold and windy out. Yesterday, I hiked the city, and hiked home to the top of Nob Hill from China Town and City Lights, and it was cold and windy then too, so I'm not feeling it today. I simply am not feeling brave and jumpy enough for The Haight and Church and possible other wonders.
So, stay in, waste it, and read H. Miller's The Air Conditioned Nightmare purchased at City Lights yesterday. Because he was human, and even here on the Mother Ship, there's way too much that's not-human. The doppelganger mad homeless I've seen in the last two days are haunting me. One, late at
night, Lioness and I having visited the Princess in town for BlogHer, and eaten at some random forgettable cafe, wait for the bus. A man is doubling over and screaming, "ahhhhalalallalalalalala!" about every four to seven seconds. He is not performing. He is mad, lost, shattered, and trying to walk down the street, but has to stop, bend, and yell every few seconds. Truly a lost soul. There is no way to help him, no one can even tell if its possible to communicate to with him. Everything that is inhuman in us infected this man and sent his self away. Next day, in Union Square Park, am waiting for another bus after visit with the Princess and new son, The Boy Detective. Another homeless man lies on the grass as if napping, head cradled in arm, face down, convulsing. I observe because he might need more aggressive help than a city shelter and hot meal. He is laughing, at nothing, and no one, alone in his laugh, and seems just as trapped in it as Yelling Man was in his yell. This is the nightmare paralleling the pretty pretty city and it's lovely lovely groove and jazzy church. Not at all ironically, these men bookended visits to The Westin St. Francis. Anyway, it was air conditioned, heavily carpeted, elegantly jammed, discreetly lit, pompously efficient in every detail. S-w-a-n-k. Lioness stayed in this day too and read for her seminars. That work, this crewe of people she's meeting, and the knowledge sister is nailing down, this will help the world suck less. I'm so wildly proud of her. While stimulating, it has not been easy for her. Brave woman.Art is not born of a dead people.
Have now returned home. Let's us begin with the return home. I can get back to hiking the city later. Air travel these days.What. As Miller puts it, writing of America as WWII gets into high gear: we sit in the sky and talk of cardboard boxes and button fasteners, while they sit in the sky and talk of extermination. Now the reverse, but still. I was waiting to sit in the sky. On the way to SFO Monday bright, I met Dean, the taxi driver. I like taxis because I never know whether the driver will be chatty and affable or not (unless in the South or Ireland where, always). Dean was chatty. He warmed me up with weather (excellent for walking, easy on the tourists), and the architecture (color, history) and BAM, we were off on Dean (the painter's) theory of urban renewal and historical restoration, which boils, correctly, down to this: How can you have a vision
for your future if you cannot see your past? A rhetorical point applicable far far beyond the city. Also, Dean is not originally from America, he's from someplace where the routine is to keep the history. And then on walking: humans are designed for it, suburbs make us fat and dead. He was vibrant, wide open, and completely one of Henry Miller's men. Alive. I arrived at SFO awake and happy and ready to go.In the city one can stroll at random and feel like a civilized human being. But not the airport. Flight out of SFO was delayed beyond my scheduled arrival time at LAX. Clearly the Travel Gods were not with me this day. Something else held their attention. This happens. Roll with it is my take. Time to give in and shop. Couple lefty mags to read (RS's cover of Obama, just he man, no words, go you RS!!) , a souvenir coffee cup for a friend who collects souvenirs from other people's trips.She's awesome. Some lunch. A snack. Some walking around noticing the distinct and unsettling lack of clocks in SFO. At last on the plane. Up, pleasantly, and notice that none other than Forrest Whitaker is sitting three rows up. -- !!!!! -- I don't know what snafu led him sit in coach on my flight, and I waited to detect the incomplete gesture, the smile not right, the tell that this was an impersonator, but no, it was him. We locked I eyes, I smiled thanks for the good work, and so there he was. All cheerful and easy. That fast way of turning his head, the slightly lazy eye, him. The French father behind me asked for a pic with his son, and got it, happily. So, you know, brush with fame. Then saw a forest fire out the window. Billows of brown smoke rising wide and high as a mountain before flattening in the lower winds. Angry thing it was. A future. Then, LAX.
They buy anything and everything, just keep the money in circulation.
Every bad thing anyone ever said about LAX is true and then some. Sadly. I'm a bright-side sort, really, don't expect angels to pee in my beer. I'm pretty sure they already did. Defeat awaits the optimist, however. It
arrives at not-quite ridiculous 11.55pm. Six minutes late, and it's tomorrow. I call the 'rents with the skinny. They suggest bargaining for an earlier flight. I try. There are none that do not route me through A. Chicago, or B. Atlanta and get me in at 1 am or 9can't wait for the pessimist. The pessimist is already there. Chat up the AA rep about the next flight to STL, of which there had better be one, and there is. at 6.20. OK, that's only a few more hours delay and puts me into STLish tomorrow morning!!!! NFW am I doing that. Call the 'rents with my refusal. Agreed. Check the flight status board. My flight is now delayed until, gulp, center self, 8.40 pm. I will not arrive in STL until 3 am, which means that I will not see my house until 4 am. Which I don't, and decide to just ride it out Tuesday and not sleep (which I didn't, until 7 pm when I fell like a stone). But, I'm in LA right now, stuck there long enough that I bought a Tshirt to commemorate the experience. These are my feet and and another book which I started reading because deconstructing the notion of hospitality in philosophy was, srsly, comforting in the badland that is LAX where was so little to be found. Because, you see, there was this huge storm over the Rockies and then the Midwest around which all the flights were diverting, both ways. In the total travel time from apartment on Nob to home at Walden, I could have hied myself to, oh, Bangkok, or Istanbul. Really.Up side of this: not the bowl of "chili" I had at the Chili's (you sad bastards) in the terminal, nor the million hours til my next cigarette. Only this: I got to fly around a thunderstorm of epic intensity for the second time in my life!!!!!! I flip out over this. This rocks. This is why there is 20th Century technology. Seeing that energy, that explosion from the point of view of angels--oh. hell. yes! I want this for a present someday: four hours circling a thunderstorm in a plane. Anyone? Coming? There will be music? C'mon. I'm going to save up for it. OK, and my iPod battery made the whole trip, and the flight attendant decided I was cute and doubled my drinks. I was not so cute at that hour, but I had inquired of the crew to make sure they felt OK and were still alert. Same attendant showed me the cover of the current US NEWS&WR, the snake eating tail, and said, "This is what the crew feels like. It's been an ass of a day." So, I was humane to this guy because he was human to me and voila, free libations for me. Easy. I mean that late at night, trapped in a tube hurtling through the sky, exhausted, sleepless, no longer able to focus well enough to read, I will not turn down booze offered to moi for being moi. Oh no. I can't sleep on planes, so I read, play cards, or drink a little. What.
THE WORLD AWAKE! Just to repeat that to yourself five times a day is enough to make an anarchist of you. How would you awaken the world? Have you ever thought about it? Or would you rather remain asleep?
On that flight, it was a toss up (but for my nosleeponplanes thing). I would fly people around thunderstorms. I would do that and say, We will have to stop this on Wednesday so that we might survive.
And that, that was the down time. I leave you with this bit from Henry, indicting myself on two counts along with all of us: The wealthy can always be induced to support another museum; the academics can always be counted upon to provide us with watch-dogs and hyenas; the critics can always be bought who will kill what is fresh and vital; the educators can always be rallied who will misinform the young as to the meaning of art; the vandals can always be instigated to destroy what is powerful and disturbing. The poor can think of nothing but food and rent problems; the rich can amuse themselves by collecting safe investments furnished to them by the ghouls who traffic in the sweat and blood of artists; the middle classes can pay admission to gape and criticize, vain about their half-baked knowledge of art and too timid to champion the men whom in their hearts they fear, know that the real enemy is not the man above, whom they must toady to, but the rebel who exposes in word or paint the rottenness of the edifice which they, the spineless middle class, are obliged to support.... Such is the state of America to-day. How long will it endure? Perhaps the war is a blessing in disguise. Perhaps, after the war we have gone through another blood bath, well will give heed to the men who seek to arrange life on in other terms than greed, rivalry, hatred, death and destruction.
That was four for five wars ago. All I have to add to this, to the coal-hot rant of that generation is this:
How dead are you willing to get?
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