Breakfast outdoors

If you can't solve a problem, enlarge it,?Dwight Eisenhower is supposed to have said; and he might have, it sounds like good military strategy.

Writers enlarge problems all the time; the enlargement of a problem is a writers specialty; the smaller the problem the better the possibilities are for literary enlargement.

I read the news this morning on my laptop. Two good things happened: 1) an ex-football player turned announcer resigned from broadcasting football on ESPN, protesting the violence in the sport and 2) a writer named Terry Pratchett requested that all his unpublished manuscripts be steamrolled upon his death. His request was honored.

Backyard, author's home, Richmond neighborhood, San Francisco, Ca. 8:30 a.m. August 31, 2017. 

Eating the middle of nowhere

There's this little café in Eureka, Nevada and we're hungry so we stop there. Mennonites own it; the women in the kitchen all wear little white knit caps.

I order the omelet and sourdough toast. What I notice especially about the women is that they all look me in the eye. 

The night before we had dinner in Ely. It was one of the most remarkable meals I've ever had. The restaurant owner and chef was from Guadalajara, Mexico–the mole sauce was extraordinary, perfectly bittersweet–and he'd somehow created an atmosphere in which everyone could be happy, both servers and diners, in the middle of nowhere.

Hwy 50, between Ely and Eureka, Nevada, 10 a.m., August 24, 2017. 

The new male narrative of democracy

Our new president, commander and chief of our forces of enlightened divination, is making many white men, his chief subjects and syncophants, re-think the white male narrative. It now goes something like this: The Born Rich bequeath To Those Born Beneath Them an extremely small portion of the working capital The Fathers of The Born Rich bequeathed Their Sons. In turn, the bequeathments to those Born Beneath Them by The Sons Born Rich become even smaller and smaller, causing The Sons of Those Born Rich to appear larger and larger in the eyes of Those Born Beneath Them. Meantime these poor people, Those Born Beneath Them, are constantly being shown by The Sons of Those Born Rich a distorted picture of everything they don't have but feel they should.

This is a crucial new twist to the social order known as Our Democracy: Those Born Beneath Them are the ones actually Born Rich, and what was once thought of as Being Born Rich is now a kind of curse, a Class of Men made up mostly of venal little white sociopaths who fear that those who have far less than they have might someday become One of Them, The New Born Rich. Thus The Sons of Those Born Rich, as our new Trump president was, become determined to not only hold tightly to their inherited wealth but to expand it by torturing and exploiting Those Beneath Them, many of whom, for some curious reason, lap up their punishment in the name of The American Way of Life.

El caballero at the "Eclipse Rodeo", Pavillion, Wyoming, August 20, 2017. 

A place on the river

About 8 miles west of the little store the guy with the funny last name burnt down for the insurance money, and approximately 25 miles or so east of the East Gate of Yellowstone Park, is where I fish.

I walk down the dirt road from my cabin in the late evening, and fish with wet flies or with live terrestrials I've caught and put in a little jam jar.

I can't tell you the name of the river; it's sworn me to secrecy.

My river, northwest Wyoming, 7:20 p.m. August, 19, 2017. 

President in Space

IDEA: let's send this guy to outer space. NASA built, state-sponsored rocket ship, replete with 9-hole golf course, small casino, game-show nymphets and a McDonalds. A perfectly good expenditure of federal tax dollars.

Trump Tower Space Mission, (prototype sketches by the author), August 19, 2017.

Going to the movies in Cody, Wyoming

I went out to the parking lot late last night in front of Cassie's Steakhouse, and who do I see there sitting in his old GMC pick up truck? Montgomery Clift.

Monty sat in the front seat, his Stetson lowered so that I could just see the bottom half of his face, from the nose to the chin. The rest of him was in shadow. 

He nodded when he saw me, the kind of nod two men who understand each other's need for privacy allow themselves. 'You're free to think and feel whatever you want to think and feel' is what Monty nodded to me, and I agreed, nodding the same back to him.

Drive-up liquor store, northwest Wyoming, August 13, 2017. 

American eclipse

Shoshoni, Wyoming--there's a kind of beauty to downtown Shoshoni, the kind artists and documentarians like to walk around in, not only to feel what the past must have felt like to those living in it but also to feel what the future might become. The buildings themselves are beautiful, walked away from by those who once owned them, boarded up, windows broken, stuffed to their ceilings by everything left behind-old furniture,  cash registers, display cases, hat racks, bubblegum machines–almost all the old rag dolls of capitalism a person could possibly imagine.

Shoshoni is where Lea Ann and I will soon come to watch the great solar eclipse of 2017. Just outside of town is supposed to be one of the best places in the world to see the moon cover up the sun for a few minutes.

Downtown, Shoshoni, Wyoming, population 649, August 10, 2017. 

The Good Life

I used to think that the good life was the life that most faithfully recreated childhood, but I was wrong. The good life is becoming old enough to know how to fill up an inflatable pool with air and water, then pulling up a chair on the lawn to watch the children swim around in it for hours.

Inflatable pool, $19.95, backyard, Spencer Roddan's home, Salt Lake City, Utah, August 8, 2017. 

Robert Frost Roddan Garfunkle

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not be Stuart Davis, a painter from the 1930's, or a Brazilian poet who wrote poems on scraps of leftover paper only to throw them away. Hello darkness my old friend, I've come to photograph you again.

The author at 2 a.m. in his favorite chair, San Francisco, Ca. July 28, 2017. 

On a theme by Ellsworth Kelly

Heather had never liked her name. When she said to people, "hello, I'm Heather," she didn't feel good about the way they looked at her. This difficulty had persisted since childhood; one therapist suggested Heather's dislike of her name gave her the ability to abstract, to literally "step outside herself," making it sound as if self-loathing was a gift. It's true, Heather could be two places at once, sitting for instance at a dinner table with others while imagining she was laying on her bed in mid-afternoon, her favorite time of day, the window open a crack, the curtains three-quarters drawn, not so much to keep the light out but to encourage the breeze to move the curtain softly, like someone was behind the curtain breathing.

Spectrograph, Ellsworth Kelley canvas, pre-gesso, concept and photograph by author, July 26, 2017. 

Poem for Bill Knott

What if you sat at your typewriter

as if you were looking into a mirror

while you were writing? 

Would you see your words

looking back at you, 

or the faces of the words

themselves?

Screenshot of the late Bill Knott's blog, 2014, the year of his death. 

Real art, hollow celebration, and Stuart Davis

The best museum show I've seen in years is now at the deYoung: "Revelations: Art from the American South." 

The worst museum show I've seen in years is now at the deYoung as well: "Summer of Love."

And then there are the paintings of Stuart Davis, a show also at the deYoung. Davis is a painter for all of America, a painter who makes paintings in which there is either nowhere or everywhere for the eye to go.

Artist statement, Mary Lee Bendolph, quilter, from the show, "Revelations: Art From The American South"; deYoung Museum, July 9, 2017.

Drinking coffee with my mother

Sometime this morning I passed through the "everything is bullshit" phase of my life.

It took me by surprise I must say, happening so quickly and without ceremony, completely extinguishing a worldview that had served me so faithfully for so many years.

I sat for an hour or so in my big black chair, drinking coffee, wondering just how to proceed, what to make of the world now that everything in it had meaning.

Photo of a protest march outside the G-20 meeting, Hamburg, Germany, as seen in The New York Times, July 8, 2017.

Autobiography of a pseudonym

I see that Albee stipulated in his will that any uncompleted manuscripts existing at the time of his death should be destroyed.

What manuscripts is Albee referring to? And where are they? If I find them first can I put my name on them?

Living room blinds, side view, San Francisco home, July 5, 2017. 

Monica Vitti

Post-war Europe was tailor-made for the existential, a time when it was so much easier to see what's wrong with ones life than what's right, and to have real reasons for doing so.

Existential Spokespeople abounded, but no one said anything with as much intelligence as Monica Vitti in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni.

"I don't dare look too long at the ocean for fear I'll lose interest in the earth." 

And. 

"There's something terrible about reality and I don't know what it is, and no one will tell me." 

Monica Vitti, from Antonioni's, "L'Eclisse", 1963, screen capture by author sometime in early 2017.

Mao Trump

We know what populists look like, we've seen them before, they're always on the right. What would a leftist populist look like? Like Mussolini?

If Donald Trump really wanted to "drain the swamp" as he says he does, he'd Tweet that he intends to make new policy re: The Supreme Court–no more lifetime appointments!

City sign, 25th and Geary, San Francisco, Ca.  June 29, 2017.

Grizzlies come off the endangered list

Please explain to me how it happened that when I stopped on the downtown street corner yesterday (1st and Mission, San Francisco) dwarfed by all the big new buildings there, I felt larger as a human being than I'd felt in some time.

Right there and then I made a vow to do more in my afterlife than I'd done here on earth.

Hotel pamphlet, as seen in the B.B. King Museum, Indianola, Mississippi, June 8, 2017. 

Local honey

Politics: the constant revival of human ideas that haven't worked in the past. 

And there are always two sides to every story, unless pure evil is involved; in that case only one side is required. 

Might there be something Heisenbergian about climate change? 

When I think of my heart as a beekeeper, everything is all right; I can breathe more easily, even while the earth is buzzing around my ears and my eyes.

I now see I've grown in grace to the degree where I now understand that paper shuffling may well be very good for society, and that bureaucracy is not necessarily a bad thing.

And that I will drown someday in the testosterone of my tears.

Mid-century modern chair in author's study, San Francisco, Ca., 6/18/17. 

A book, unplugged

I'm going to sit at my desk for awhile until things look interesting.

Then what...read a book?

A book needs light.

Yes, a book needs both light and darkness, unlike a tv.

A tv is quite often more visually arresting when the tv itself is turned off rather than on.

Sign, grocery store, Clarksdale, Mississippi, June 10, 2017. 

The blues inside me

The day I return home from Mississippi I ask the magic eight ball, "should I keep my mother's transistor radio?" 

The delta's still whispering in my ear, a parade route full of superstition, small towns and good times, a place that builds its own museum everyday.

"Mama," I say, "the thing's antique and needs batteries, but when I put it to my ear I can still hear you singing."

Abandoned drive-in hamburger stand, Winona, Mississippi, June 12, 2017.