Love, Obedience and The Four Noble Truths

Weather from the north this morning. Sunny and cold. The sun is coming up earlier now and our first walk in the morning has daylight. Today the frost on the moss looked like crystals and the sun was slanting down on them making tiny prism rainbows. Dot immediately rolled and stretched, sniffed and explored every inch she could with her nose and mouth. Everything seems new to her every day. Down on the tide flat there were some puddles of fresh water that were frozen over with thin coverings of ice which she had to sniff, then shatter, and jump back plopping her big puppy feet in the wet sand: astounded! Barking whirling then off to find another and equally excited by the next. Then I whistled her back up to the yard where she danced for joy with kelp fronds in her mouth. Her silly joy makes me so happy, it makes up for her stubbornness.

Her latest thing is she has discovered she is big enough that her head reaches our tall counter tops. She can easily lick the butter in the butter dish, or steal food off a plate. Of course this is simply not allowed. But yelling at her creates a barking game, Hitting her makes her head shy and impossible to call her home. But yell at her we do and then when she repeats the barking game she goes outside with us or goes into her crate.. Sometimes I flip her over on her belly and get really stern with her and sometimes slap her belly like a spanking when she nips and Jan at me during discipline sessions. Obedience.

We never spanked our only child. His punishment was always having to listen to our endless talk. Or being alone in his room, with his books, which was not much punishment at all, or taking away some favorite thing. As a toddler Jan would NOT play the gravity game, when young Finn thought it was funny to throw things off his high chair to watch his mom get it for him. She did it for tiny baby Finn but when she saw him laughing when she got the thing, the toy or the food, for him. She just stopped doing it. The food or toy just disappeared, Most commonly it was eaten by the floor shark, that was our dog at the time. Finn would cry but shortly he stopped playing the gravity game.

Obedience. it is a constant problem and the source of so much stress in our lives: diets, and health routines. Essentially the Ten Commandments Moses carried off the Mountain are all about Obedience. If you follow that tradition, one of the first time God himself, speaks to an official representative on earth, (arguably… I know) God gives him a set of rules to obey.

Obedience is hard. I know. Believe me I’m not trying to sell you anything. No other way around it. How do I know this, because more than half the world follows a philosophy that tries to explain the pain of obedience.

The Four Noble Truths in a nutshell. The Buddha leaves his rich fathers house and discovers people are unhappy. He starts praying and meditation about this. He prays a long time. He comes up with this,: Everyone suffers. Everything suffers, why because everything will die, everything is interconnected, and everything is transient in this world. So this means that everything from a blade of grass to the Buddah struggles to be obedient to it’s form. The Buddha says. There is a way out of this. This need to be obedient to your form is a desire of the mind. You don’t have to be any form. You just have to be. You can stop wanting. If you can stop the desire, you can leave the obedience behind you can leave the suffering behind.

Okay, sounds good to me. How do I do that? Well the Buddah said, you think about the way I did and you live right. You follow the eight fold path: a right view, Right Resolve, Right Speech, Right conduct, right livelihood, right mindfulness, right effort, and right samadi, which is the practice of mediation resulting in feeling a union with all things. Easy right? It is essentially follow the tenants of interconnectedness, transience, suffering and compassion, most of all compassion. Easy Peasy.

No, of course not. The problem is this tradition is bound by an ancient tradition and ancient language that has gone through thousands of years of history and dozens of countries, sects, military rulers, economies, governments who all have put their fingers all over this philosophy. So, that many writers and practitioners can claim to be the true interpreter of the true path.

Obedience to whom? Always a problem, even when shedding obedience.

Dot’s office Crate.

Of course my personal problem with the Four Noble Truths is that the philosophy has passed through thousands of years of languages, cultures, geographies, that are absolutely foreign to me. I have no idea of the traditions, the authentic literature, even the real food from which it sprang. Not to mention that it has splintered into hundreds of different sects and types and has morphed into so many nationalistic functions, What started in compassion is now used to justify genocide in Laos. My understanding of Buddhism is really and understanding of a San Francisco Beat Poet academic splinter group that is probably as American as southern fried chicken. I am a tourist when It comes to Buddhism with a flower print shirt and a camera around my neck. So out of it I wouldn’t even be able to recognize an authentic expert. All experts are just taking a little sip from a big river now.

But of course it sounds nice because it talks about overcoming suffering and obedience. When in practice in the countries that hold to the philosophy the populations are rarely very diverse nor are they very open to diversity. It all works as long as the understanding of the word “right” in the eightfold path is understood clearly. My hipster friends in North Beach California in the fifties understood it to mean having sex a lot and the women did the dishes while the men went mountain climbing. But that too was perhaps a little culture bound.

Christian teaching is more direct and simple. Christianity comes in high and hard with love but then the next pitch is a change up with obedience. This is probably how I was raised if I am truthful with myself… and how I am trying to train Dot.

I will love Dot but there are rules she must obey. There is a “form” she must adhere to and see herself as. I want her to be a good puppy, just as my parents wanted me to be a good boy. I will love Dot but if she eats food off the counter I will punish her and make her aware of her sin. She will have failed to be a “Good Puppy.” If she bites my hand she will be a very bad puppy. She will be disobedient.

But here is the problem with puppies and with people who have questions about obedience. I will love Dot even if she pees on the floor or if she eats butter off the counter. Dot knows this somehow. She wakes up every morning and she is happy and wiggly and she loves to see me. She doesn’t cower and she wants to snuggle. Yet still she misbehaves. Yet still I love her. Obedience is hard. For her and for me.

Simone Weil was a Polish poet and philosopher who moved to France and died during the World War II she would only eat what the Polish Jews were fed in the camps. She died of malnutrition. As she was dying speaking of God she wrote, “How He must love me, to make us both wait so long,” which I always thought was heartbreaking. But it was the first time I thought of God being an entity that suffered for us.

But of course Weil had converted to Catholicism and they, like Buddhists have given a lot of thought to suffering, but more in the practice of it rather than the practice of overcoming it.

Anyway… for the real world pursuit of overcoming suffering and the pursuit of love I think the only thing is patience. It just takes time and determination. That’s the bad news for most Americans. Obedience will always just be plain hard. That’s the nature of it. There is no quick fix for anything. Dot will eventually stop eating butter off the counters and we will always love her, she will not be a neurotic like Woody Allen forever in therapy feeling guilty that he never met the expectations of his owners/ ah… parents. I think our lives are more similar to mules than to New York intellectuals, we will finish plowing the field, and if we are lucky we will get to the end with God.

But don’t freak out. I’m not a good Christian either. I’m just like you, trying to get through this pandemic without getting anybody sick.

Heavy frost,

on a bright morning,

with a bad dog by my side.

jhs

Here is a recording I made this morning. It’s another reading from The Big Both Ways, I decided to read some of the IWW stuff to tie into what I read yesterday.

Dot was a total pain in the butt.

Getting Help

Yesterday a big storm blew through. Heavy winds and hard rain. I had a ketamine infusion and slept most of the afternoon and I’m sorry I didn’t get to my blog. I didn’t even take Dot for a walk but she was sweet to me all afternoon and to Jan as well.

Today is lovely with a few high clouds and no rain. The waves generated by the storm are washing up on our beach and the herring did spawn near the rocks of our beach so the kelp is nice and stinky which Dot loves.

Today I’m still a little sleepy from the infusion of ketamine. I was the first patient that received the treatment in Sitka and it was a bit different. The room was full of doctors and observers and I’m the kind of person who feels as if I should converse with people while they are studying me like a bug. “Where are you from?” I ask, “ How did you happen to come to Sitka? Does your spouse like it here? Don’t you think it’s interesting that the ceiling has turned to molten jewels?” That kind of thing. Their laughter sounded like barking sea lions. I was killing that room. It seemed like more and more people came in as time went on. But that may have been just me.

I like my psychiatrist. He worked hard to get Ketamine treatments in Sitka. He is very smart and learned, has a lot of experience. I don’t do much therapy with him. I had twenty years of therapy with other shrinks and finally came to the end of one session and asked what more was there? I felt like I had cried about every possible thing in my childhood that I could dredge up. My psychiatrist at the time said, “Well John, some people just enjoy therapy, and they go one with it for years. You appear to have a neurological problem that only drugs can treat..” So, I told him I didn’t enjoy talking to him enough to have my insurance pay him two hundred dollars every two weeks, so I just took the drugs and checked in with a shrink every six weeks to monitor the handful of pills I took.

Red chairs, listening.

But the depression got worse and more frequent. I started seeing this new doctor. I started telling him my problems…. not with my parents…. or my dreams…. but with the drugs I was taking… he took me off of everything and started me up on new things, When I reported I didn’t like the side effects or that they didn’t seem to work, we kept tweaking. I felt better. Much better. Able to focus and work. But still every six weeks or so I would go dark with recurring compulsive thoughts of suicide, and hopelessness, and self loathing. I knew I didn’t want to die, but the more these thoughts came on the more I hated myself for thinking the thoughts and the more I felt I deserved to die. Loop after loop of desperate thinking that would last about ten days then they would lift, to return again in a month. Other people have this and they report that the older they got the worse it got. I saw other Doctors in Seattle. It was recommended I do electroconvulsive therapy. But my eye surgeon said I risked blowing out my good eye and being totally blind, and that sounded depressing as hell. So last September I started the Ketamine. I have written about it here, and I find it almost miraculous in it’s effectiveness. After the opening treatments, I did not have any of the compulsive thoughts of suicide.Everything else seemed normal, no side effects. My memory was good, I was appropriately sad about painful things in my life, but no suicidal thoughts. Gone. I am now a big fan. I went four months without another treatment and the thoughts started coming back just as hard. So now I’m back on a treatment of every six to eight weeks. Do I like having to take medication like that. No. But I don’t like the alternative either. Life is not perfect and I can accept that now too.

Getting help, is not always easy to do. Particularly for mental health issues. Many of you might be thinking about this right now. We have lots of issues now in these extraordinary times that because the times are crazy our reactions to them are completely appropriate: anxiety, lethargy, sadness, worry, anger, maybe changes in appetite, changes in activity. Maybe drinking more? Maybe smoking more? All these things are or could easily be part of all our lives right now. But how do we know when to reach out for help. What about the things that want to block us from getting help?

Dot’s first reaction to “Lets go for a walk!”

Money. I’m lucky to have health insurance through my retirement plan. Many aren’t. Many don’t have insurance that covers mental health. It’s just short of a crime. I saw so many public defender clients who could have benefited from early mental health interventions, but now are in forever jail. I have too many stories but I did know a young man who went to kindergarden with our son who started hearing voices in his head received treatment off and on, and now is in prison serving more than two hundred years for murder.

This may seem like an extreme case, and of course I need to remind everyone that people who are mentally ill are far more likely to be the victims of crime than they are to be the perpetrators of crimes. Here, clearly was someone who did not ask for help, and did not take the warning signs seriously until it was far, far, too late. I sat with him at his sentencing, back on his medication. Healthy, for all purposes normal again, listening to the summary of his most terrible actions he can barely remember as if they were the actions of a phantom who lived inside of him.

Now, of course we have to ask, would he have taken his meds even if he had good insurance? Would he have stuck with his program. It’s not clear. He had treatment off and on in his life. We still don’t think of mental health as “real health care”. Often we think of it as a character issue. I know in my parents generation it was a sign of poor character to be unhappy. Patton slapped the shell shocked soldier. My father told me “to pull up my socks” after my first suicide attempt at 14, and this was just a few years after he had been hospitalized for a “nervous breakdown” when he woke up crying and couldn’t stop crying for several days. He self medicated with alcohol all his life. I don’t blame him, he was a good, funny non-violent man of his time, but it was a time which was unaware of the inner life and the effects it could have on a family. He honestly did his best, I think, just as we have done with our son. Time and our son’s health will tell us how we did.

So, back to the question, when do you ask for help? if cost is against you you have to seek the best alternative. Medicaid, Medicare if you are of age, community, programs. Often, I go to public health centers or public Libraries and ask the person at the desk that is a good place to start. Ask a friend who is in your situation. Find a doctors office and ask them. Just start asking is the beginning and then looking at your budget and realizing that your feelings are a real medical health care need.

Okay, but when is it real enough to get help? Okay in these crazy times, being crazy seems normal. We all like to yell at the TV when the news is on… but do you yell at other people? Your spouse? Your kids, when the news is on? Losing your temper is a good sign of something out of whack. Getting into fights is frustration that is asking a question that doesn’t have a good answer. The question is “What the fuck is wrong?” If the answer you come up with over and over is, “Everybody around me is an asshole.” Then maybe you need outside help. Or maybe you are just alienated from your family? What’s up with that? Were you always? Why now? Can you just start by talking with your spouse? How would you start? Ask him or her, “Honey do you think we are drifting apart?” See what they say? If you are secretly angry at them it might come out boom or it might not come out until later. But asking is a good start.

Being sleepy is okay, and maybe you need a check up or some other of your medications is wacky, But maybe you are sleeping all the time to avoid being with other people? Maybe you love the night because you don’t sense time passing like in the day? Maybe no one else is around to judge you? If you go nocturnal maybe you need to talk with someone. Sleep patterns out of whack, always a good sign. Even in this social distancing, if you are the only one in your house that has gone nocturnal then you may want to have a conversation with someone.

Drinking more, being noticeably drunk everyday, when you weren’t before. What’s up with that? Does that have an effect on other things? Same with drugs. You have to judge those.

Suicidal thoughts. Okay, everyone has them. But how often? What kind? First you have to acknowledge that you are having them. Note down how often and what are they like? Are they vague, or are they becoming more specific? Are they shaping into a plan? Confront these thoughts. Can you turn these thoughts off? Do they keep coming back at certain times during the day? Okay if they do become specific, planning kind of thoughts that are coming unbidden. Talk with someone. If you take any kind of action, call someone immediately. You will not be jerked out of your shoes and put into a mental institution unless you are in an extremely dangerous situation and even then there would be a legal process where you would have a lawyer (your own or appointed) represent your best interests.

Dot’s second reaction to “Come on, let’s go for a walk!”

But here is the thing. The earlier you get help the better it will be. This is the truth with colds, cancer and mental illness. If you get help when you first start noticing suicidal thoughts you will walk into a therapists and you will have a nice reassuring talk and come out feeling better with an appointment for the next week. If you wait until you have a loaded gun on the table, a bottle of whisky with a dozen tablets of Dexedrine scattered across the floor while you are crying though your snot about how your are going to blow the head off the next person who comes through that door to the suicide prevention counselor you just found on Google, then you have waited too long and your life has already turned to shit without you knowing it. .

So of course the big ones that I always asked my clients at the PDA. Do you hear things that no one else hears? Do you see things that no one else sees? Actual things. These are not one time things, like a flutter of the eye, or even a waking dream of a dead parent during a time of grief. Or even a one time hallucination or ghost story. But persistent voices speaking with you that come from some magical source. Do not be afraid. No one will judge you or treat you badly. They won’t lock you up or argue with the way you feel. Just go talk with someone. These voices are coming to you for a reason, don’t you want to find out why? If you believe you are having a religious vision or message associated with these visions or voices, go immediately to share them with your ministers. They will help you interpret them, and hopefully they will get you to a doctor to help you control the voices so they are not worrying to you.

But eating ice-cream… as long as your diabetes is under control and your doctor says it’s okay. I’m with you. You can call doctors and I think you can get all the phone-in therapy you want these days. Lots of people don’t like it but lots of people are getting used to it. You can get your drugs in the mail or pick up outside the pharmacy. The important thing is to First: Ask for help, and second find a way to pay for it. In that order. Mental health is real health care. People suffer and die from the lack of it, we need it.

Okay…. that’s it. John and Dot’s guide to mental health emergencies.

No rain, on cold day

black dog rolling in the grass:

happy all the time.

jhs

Here is a recording I made this morning on our first walk of the day at six thirty. First your hear a loud raven and then a noisy eagle right above him. It’s just a short snippet.

Here is a recording I made this morning of another reading from The Big Both Ways. Dot was quite good while I read this time so I took her out for a walk right after.

John and Dot's Theory of Happiness

Snow last night and the big moon did not wake me up. Winter seems to wrap us in her arms like a mother on a train platform as the train bell rings and the pistons begins to chug. Surely spring will come someday.

But Dot loves the snow. She has the zoomies all morning: running in circles and sliding on her back. She eats snow with abandon. Then she rushes to the beach and picks mussels off the rocks and brings them up and packs them in the snow and throws them into the air and eventually eats everything, snow, shells and mussel all together. She is joyful today. Tiny flakes continue to fall on her black coat and she snaps at them hopping and bucking like a horse before she takes off on another circuit around the house, around the yard then around me, before she comes and sits on my feet and snuggles against my legs. Now she is asleep in her crate. Where before, when I was making the recording I could not get her anywhere near her crate.

Some scientists say that happiness is a simple formula of neurochemistry. Hormones from exercise, or meditation, religious teaching can line up the synapses and create happiness, and if not joy, at least a predisposition toward happiness rather than despair. Others are the opposite, predisposed to melancholy and not joy. I think this is fairly obvious. I myself have undergone Ketamine therapy in the last year and I’m certain that it has changed my predisposition. I am no longer tilted toward melancholy and despair. I can be what I call, “appropriately sad” but not the narcissistic kink of sad which wants to pile on unhappiness as if it is a kind of a virtue. Neither am I particularly “sunny” who sees the good in everyone and every situation. But how do we come to find a balance, particularly in a time like this, which is frightening and potentially dire?

I don’t know, for certain how to encourage happiness in this time of sickness and isolation but I try and look to the things that are free and right in front of our eyes. I’ve written about things like routine, making the bed, little acts of kindness, cooking, I’m sure I’ve mentioned activity and exercise, walking, reading poetry and playing with your dog. I suppose happiness is related to humor in that it is the ability to look at conflict and see a resolution that ends with a happy if not just plain ridiculous outcome thwarting death.

Snow melting off around eleven.

Okay why did I even have to mention death? Jesus, Mr. Debbie Downer can’t we just forget about death for the duration of this whole ordeal? I’m afraid, we can’t. Nope. Not possible. Death won’t let us, and the reason we are bugging about this whole caronavirus in the first place is because it is deadly. It would be a whole other matter if it was a really, really bad rash… but it’s not. it’s deadly, and it’s stealthy, We don’t know who has it and who is going to give it to us and when. And the other big problem is Death has always been that way.. It has always clouded our dreams, and shaped our humor and our drama. So the first step towards happiness is to accept THAT. Death happens to everything and everyone. Yep…. everyone. Look around. Yep…. yep…. yep… him too, her and her, yep, yep, yep, and of course you too.

I know. It sucks. The only question is when. The other hard thing you might think it’s easier when when you are old. But from my little slice of information. The longer you live and the more you say you are ready to go, just saying it, really has nothing to do with actually being ready to go. Actually being ready to go, I think has to do only comes from immediate physical and unbearable physical pain and not acceptance of death. This two-bit insight comes from asking orderlies who move dead bodies in “rest” homes and they all say that most people’s final expression is with their mouth wide open struggling to take one more breath. So… you can trust that or not, but I think everyone wants to keep living no matter what they say or how old they are.

I know I want to live, but still we try to prepare our selves for death. That’s what jokes are all about, and poetry, and a lot of damn good books, and a lot of our troubling dreams. So… what I’m saying is it’s gonna happen. It was always gonna happen, and that was no different before this goddamn virus or right now in the middle of it. Not that there is a whole lot of other stuff we can’t worry about, say the collapse of our sacred institutions like Democracy but hey, there is an argument that that was in danger way before this virus too.

The one second Dot stayed still today.

So, like that big old fun bag Leo Tolstoy said, “It’s helpless, it’s all helpless. Listen to me, I’m consoling you!” It’s true, once you accept how bleak it really is, things start to look up on a day by day basis. I’m not kidding. The frolicking puppy starts to look like a kind of wondrous miracle, and each moment you get to spend warming your feet between the legs of your partner under clean sheets and an old comforter is nothing short of a religious experience. “Wait a second,” You might say, “what if she has died, or if she has left me and I’m all alone.? Well, I am sorry, but you got to know that joy. That experience is like money in the bank of joyful experience. You can replay it. You can pay it forward to grand children, you can remind them, and yourself that those are the kinds of joys that are worth living for and not the bullshit you see advertised on TV or paraded around on lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. And yes, there is suffering in this life. If Buddhist teachings are to believed all existence suffers, and the only way out of that is to stop wanting it to be otherwise.

But that gets a little mystical. I just don’t think God or Fate or Karma is picking on us now. All I’m saying is that in these uncertain times maybe all we can do is just count our blessings or luck at how lucky we are no matter what our philosophy or faith, and love our neighbor, even if they might not deserve it. Don’t fritter our time away worrying about the “whys?” of death, just keep acting reasonably in trying to keep ourselves and others from getting sick. I honestly think if we can do these things, which is plenty to do by the way, then happiness comes along with all of it.

There you go. John and Dot’s theory of happiness in the time of pandemic.

Spring snow on wet ground,

a clumsy dog running hard

falls into my arms.

jhs

Here is a recording I made in my office this morning. I read the beginning of my book THE BIG BOTH WAYS. Dot was a pain in the butt, she didn’t want to be inside and she didn’t want to be on the porch. I was a bit distracted. Give a listen.

A Mitsva

Snow today, hard snow blowing in from the west. By late afternoon it was turning to rain, but for a time it was a blizzard, with the sun just burning behind it.turning the world a bluish grey out over the ocean, swirling particles of white blowing up onto the grey/green shore. I did not hear birds anywhere. Last night a big moon splintered through the cold bare trees, waking me up when it was perfectly framed in my window. Dot got up wanting to run, she frolicked hard all around, dancing and throwing every ball and every toy over her head. She rad full tilt from one end of the yard to another: ears flopping, loose limbed, still a puppy but weighing over fifty pounds now. I’m not sure what it was but if you told me it was storm or full moon energy or both mixed with puppy exuberance I would believe you. Before Jan went upstairs to work she wanted to throw the ball for Dot and she did. I came inside to write some letters for a friend who is sick and having a hard time, I looked out and caught sight of Jan’s hat flying through the air and Jan laid out flat on the lawn not moving. Dot was dancing with Jan’s stocking hat, throwing it in the air and catching it. I ran outside to Jan, Jan said, “I’m okay, she just knocked me down and I don’t want to try and get up when she is like this because she comes right over to me to play some more and knocks me right over when I am most vulnerable, trying to stand. “ It took me a while to sort things out. Get the hat get it back on Jan’s head. Get Dot and get her inside then get Jan on her feet. Jan was a bit damp, but unhurt. I asked her again if we should look for another owner for Dot, and Jan looked at me like I was crazy. “I love Dot. She is just so enthusiastic, and I am a bit wobbly. It’s not her fault. We worked it out. I fell on in a soft place and didn’t get hurt and I just stayed down.”

Falling in a soft place. We are lucky if we can do such a thing. Also we are lucky if we can love enough to take these kind of bumps and not turn the indignities into someone else’s fault. Jan could have easily blamed Dot, but she didn’t. She took it on herself. She fell in a soft spot and just stayed down. What a good person she is.

I read about the Captain of an aircraft carrier who was worried about his crew getting the virus. This seems like a reasonable thing for a captain to worry about. I don’t know the whole story. I don’t know how the story got out to the press. I just heard that he has the virus and he was relieved of duty and walked off his ship alone while his crew looked on. A civilian vice secretary of the Navy said that he must have been “too dumb to command the ship.” Which I don’t really understand, I have to believe that there is more to the story than the pettiness of someone’s ego involved.. I hope this Captain is able to fall in a soft place and live out his life with his dignity intact.

Today Jan and I both tried to do one kind thing for some one else. As I said I wrote some letters for a friend who was having problems writing letters for herself. It was an easy thing for me to do it. She just told me what she wanted to say and I was able to type them up and send them to her. It was easy and she was very appreciative. Hardly an heroic act in fact it was fun to do. Jan printed out three chapters of a new edition of Ed Ricketts from Cannery Row To Sitka, Alaska to give to Nancy Ricketts at the Pioneers Home. We stopped by McDonalds drive through and bought “One Senior Coffee with Two Creams” and asked them to put it in a bag. This is how Nancy likes it. We took everything to the home and gave it to the nurse on duty who is stationed by the back door to make sure no visitors come in, and she told us that Nancy just came in from her “smoke break.” Now, Nancy doesn’t smoke, she is ninety two years old and I think she may have smoked at one time but not for a very long time, but the home allows people outside for “smoke breaks” and she takes advantage of that to get some fresh air and visit some people from a good distance apart only on the outside. Today she had stood out in the falling wet snow and spoken with our friend Norman Campbell about his artwork and then rolled her walker back inside to warm up, where she was met with a “senior coffee with two creams.” She called us to tell us just how happy she was, in fact I think she was ecstatic.

Doing something to make someone else happy is a good thing to do during this pandemic. No, it doesn’t make you a hero, like the doctors and nurses who are working twenty hours a day and risking their own lives trying to save strangers lives. But throwing a ball for a goofy young dog or writing a letter for a friend or taking a friend in retirement home is something that puts a little weight on the side of happiness in the great balance of things, and by doing so, we feel a bit lighter in our own step, a bit happier ourselves, and what’s that worth? I don’t know, but I do know there have been moments when I had run out of happiness. completely drained the tank and I would have given anything… the last full measure of my life to have that bit of uplift to put my feet forward, on to the next day. So I remember those times, and I think it’s always worth it to make someone else happy if the chance comes along, because I will always need that uplift again.

Many years ago I wrote a poem about suicide here it is:

One Sided

On the day after you killed yourself

we spoke over the phone. 

You said it wasn’t over,

this  life you thought

you could turn off

like a light.

You said you’re stuck near a phone

with my number scratched in the paint

and all you can do is talk to me

without even changing your clothes,

stiff as meat wrappers

with your own blood.

 I thought of saying how much I hated you

for that pitiless betrayal,

that turning away,

but I wanted to hear your voice again

so I stayed on.

You wouldn’t let me say a thing;

you talked and talked

but in the pauses

when I heard your breathing

on the end of the line,

I remembered the autumn

we stood on the precipice

above the crushed shell beach

and the wind took our voices away

into that immaculate distance

where there is always room enough,

where there is always time enough.

You started to justify yourself and I hung up.

there is nothing I want to hear from you now.

At night I take the receiver off the hook

but when I sleep, I hear you dialing,

doing everything in your power

to get through.

The big round moon woke me up last night so I took her picture.

I was teaching at a high school in Whitehorse Yukon with the great Canadian Poet, Patrick Lane, I read the poem and we were discussing it with the students. I was talking about it and about the friend I had written it about, a friend of mine in high school. Patrick Lane spoke up and said, “I don’t think this poem is about that friend at all. I think it is about the death of your little whiney self.”

We all stopped and I thought about it and of course I was embarrassed.

“No,” he went on, “you were tired of thinking of killing yourself and having this little whiney voice holding you hostage and you got sick of it and you grew a pair of balls and hung up on him.”

And of course he was right…. but we didn’t discuss the last line of how I heard him “trying to get through.”

But he was right none the less and it was a great act of kindness. it was the uplift I needed at that time. I suppose a jewish person would call it a mitsva.

So now during this pandemic, I look for this small things that I can do for others, little acts of kindness I can do for someone else. Calling someone to check on them, giving to a charity or just buying some one a cup of coffee.. Helping without putting yourself at risk. People of all faiths do it. Republicans do it, Democrats to it. Libertarians do it. Why don’t we do it more? This might be the lesson we take out of this mess.

Wet snow, down my shirt,

bringing you coffee today

I miss seeing you.

 jhs

Here is a recording I made today, reading from Richard Nelson’s The Island Within. Dot was in her crate.

Icy

Heavy Frost on the ground this morning. Once again the Hummingbird feeder was frozen when I got up. I got in the hot tub early and Dot stole my underwear and danced out on the frozen lawn with them to throw them up into the air like pizza dough, spinning high above her head and then catching them in her teeth. Joyfully over and over only to lay down and stretch them between jaws and her back legs. Jesus that dog likes her fun.

We went for a walk with a friend out at the state park on the frosty board walk. There was a light westerly wind and a flock of skinny looking Robbins came down into the estuary dabbing in the icy mud. Dot has a new severe training collar and she is much better on a leash. The collar doesn’t seem to hurt her but she doesn’t pull as much. There are reports of Brown Bears all over the park but I did not see any fresh tracks today.

I have decided to share some of my unpublished poems today, It’s not a big deal that these are unpublished because I don’t send poems out for magazines much anymore. I write poems in the winter time for a poetry group and I write to keep my mind working, I write to know what I’m thinking about much in the way I write in a journal to know where I am and what I have been doing. Poetry tells me what I’ve been feeling. This first one is in the form of a Haibun; a short piece of pros followed by a haiku. This is from my Public Defender days

CAMERA OBSCURA

 I asked him if he had ever seen something that no one else had seen.  He was chained to the wall in our small town jail.  Through two and a half feet of concrete, a storm was whipping rain at the outside walls and with each gust over sixty knots the cheap ceiling tiles rustled on their frames.  He was looking at the tops of my shoes soaked through with water.  “Only once, when I was five years old. My mom was cleaning house and she left the window open.  A Dragonfly.  A big one.  I mean really.  It had a wingspan of twelve feet.  No I’m not kidding.  It’s eyes were full of diamond-y kind of things.  It’s body was all black and the wings were kind of bluish-clear .  It landed on the wall of our kitchen.  My mom was in the other room, and I yelled at her to tell her about it.  She beat on the wall from where she was.  I could hear her beating right under the bug and it twitched around…flew out the window.  I never saw nothing like that ever again.

 A frantic fall storm.

   My head is a sealed box with

only one small hole.

Spruce tree in bright sun, on a cold day, 4/4/2020

 I had a goal to read all the big fat books I had never finished in college. I wrote this one after reading the new translation of War And Peace.

READING WAR AND PEACE

“Drops dripped.” 

The teapot simmered on the stove.

Old people harvested wheat

and distant generals wrote letters

to be carried to the capitol.

Armies marched.

The snow fell.

People fell in love.

People died.

Boys wanted to be soldiers,

girls wanted to be wives,

and those who thought they were clever

discovered they were not,

but sometimes not in time.

All of it just happened,

like the music,

of thawing snow

sliding off the eves

or the incidental tracks

of  horse drawn carts

hauling wounded men

through a forest

of splintered trees. 

Drops dripped,

and hit the ground

with imperceptible splashes

while the great Russian rivers

raged.

This is a seasonal poem I wrote after reading a new translation of Madame Bovery which was terrific and I finished it around this time last year.

ICE STORM

 Four degrees and the willow tree

covered in frost,

is a pearl curtain

with last summers fawn

curled like a figurine beneath.

My heart is fragile:

no birds singing,

old friends in the hospital,

letters gone unanswered. 

But my beloved, makes bread,

reading Madame Bovery in her flannel robe,

the yeasty dough rising under a heatlamp

by the stove.

Bread will rise,

like spring’s arrival

as the right ear of the once

spotted fawn twitches forward

when I stumble outside

to give thanks for these

blessings, then write

our names on the frosty grass.

All these photos were taken today on our walk out at Stargavan Park near Old Sitka.

 Although I don’t think the New Yorker is going to publish a poem that ends with me alluding to writing our names in the frost with urine. Which is something of a family tradition among the Straleys.

The day sparkles sun

though the Swans have gone, and shots

still echo the hills.

jhs

Here is a recording I made in the office reading from Richard Nelsons, Hunters of The Northern Ice.

Food

Snowing today. tiny little flakes like motes of dust. Cold wind, and the clouds obscure the islands just off shore. Definitely a hostile day for human beings not interested in winter sports. Yesterday there was some herring spawn along hat the road system in town. The sea turned milky white and turquoise in places as the females came in and laid down their clear caviar sized eggs and then the males their milt on top. Many of the Tlingit families and some cooperative boats laid hemlock boughs there and other places already to get herring eggs for human consumption. It is very rich food. Especially when dipped in seal oil. It reminds me what a Native guy once told me long ago, “Fat is where it’s at, baby!”

I went to the grocery store again today. I saw another guy wearing a pistol outside his pants; an older man there with his wife. I wondered if as he got dressed to go out he put the pistol on as an afterthought thinking, “Just in case I have to shoot some fucker over by the dairy case today.” It really wasn’t crowded in the store and gunplay was the furthest thing from my mind, except I was wearing a bandanna across my face so I was self conscious that I might look like an old west bank robber coming into my grocery store. Nobody gave me a second look. Not even the guy with the pistol. Such are the times we live in.

I was only supposed to buy butter, but I bought salad stuff and ice-cream and a freshly made pepperoni pizza to make for lunch when I got home. I also bought two bottles of ice tea, one for me and one for Jan to go with our lunch as a treat for her, Then I got some cream cheese because it was on sale, and I thought they had fresh bagels which are good for breakfast but I forgot to look for them before I left the store. I went to the self serve check out because why have someone else handle your stuff, especially when you are dressed like a robber? I was thirsty too so I started drinking my tea while I was inside the store. I like the people who work at our store, for the most part, the guy who works the front side, is part of the big grocery family and he studied music in college and he has really good music show on the local radio station and he helps direct some of the musical theater in town. The store gives a lot to the Fine Arts Camp in town, it’s a good family and a good store.

Snowing on April 3, 2020 Cold Day during the pandemic of 2020 and “Social Distancing”

I’m grateful for the food I have access to, I have not put in enough wild food in the last few years. I have thought of this more recently. I lost the vision in my right eye and have not taken the time to learn to shoot from the other side. Our son moved to California without becoming a proficient hunter, which he regrets. He was a pretty good fisherman. We have traded fish for moose meat with a friend up north and I like that. Jan travels north for business often and the trade works out well. Food security is on everyones mind these days. What would we do if the barge didn’t come in? What would we do if the fuel barge didn’t come in. Our electricity comes in the form of hydro from a dam, and that is pretty secure as long as it keeps running and the parts can keep coming in, but again, in our modern times we are so closely dependent on other people and other skill sets. The electric person, the tow boat skipper, and crew, the grocer, and the farmer so far away, not just the farmer but the crews who pick, and cut and sort, the mechanics who keep the machines running where the jobs have been mechanized. The plumbers and engineers who keep the water running and the turbines spinning, I eat a piece of celery in my salad in Alaska and I have a hard time thinking of how many people I should include in my thanks, or an avocado… and I really like avocados. They used to be rare in Alaska when I first moved here, kind of an exotic treat, but now I kind of expect them, for almost three fifty a piece., Jesus.

I know there is a lot of food on the tide flat and in the ocean, in the woods, but how would we organize ourselves on an island to harvest it and distribute it? Winner take all? First come, first serve? In our little town of 9 thousand. All the beaches on the road system would be picked clean in the first week. If fuel was limited, where would the fishing grounds be? Would be back to sailing vessels? Would others group together to feed the elderly and the sick? Would we take care of the children as a community or would each family be responsible completely alone? Would it get Lord of the flies ugly right away, or would we organize into some kind of civilized society? I think some people like to assume the worst. It makes a better and more dramatic story, but I bet in our little town it would end up in a series of long, long meetings, breaking out into small groups, reporting back into big groups, all the usual suspects would be there along with some new players who would be moved out of their houses to keep the peace or to make sure they got their say or wouldn’t be left out. at the end of the world, and in the end, we’d have a kind of Swiss Family Robinson Bureaucracy based on fairness and ernest attempts to share and do right by everybody. Pretty boring actually. Oh there would be some big fights, there might even be some gun play but in the end, in Sitka, AK, if the shit really hit the fan, and help didn’t come in the form of Coast Guard Helicopters or US Navy landing craft right away it wouldn’t look like the aftermath of West World, or the Zombie Apocalypse when help finally did arrive . It would probably look like one of our public meetings and bake sales, but with more meat.

Spring snow, like white dust

falling from the trees all day

… then disappearing.

jhs

Here is a recording I made in the office today, reading and talking about the Haiku of Richard Wright. Dots out on the porch and she seemed prettying interested, at least she didn’t bark much, but you can hear her bumping around in the background.

Gods and Birds

Another is the streak of good weather. The Cod fishermen seem happy but I’ve heard that the fish are small so far this year and people are wondering why. The whales that were close to shore are no longer here and have moved back off the beach with the herring. Soon the sport salmon season will begin but of course with the virus in full swing the charter business is on hold. The big question is for how long? Still no blossoms, the crocuses I saw last week have disappeared, and still no daffodils but I suppose I should survey some other gardens pretty soon as things warm up.

The wood peckers are noisy back in the trees and the eagles are playing their broken flutes out on their perches overlooking the water, which make me think the herring are coming. A kingfisher has been working the tide flats each morning and there crows are dropping mussel shells on our lawn. Often they will drop them on the deck to break them open or they will feel secure enough to crack them open with their beaks, but now I think Dot has taken care of that.

“Hello, Audubon Magazine? You better scrap your cover for next month I have a photograph of a Dove!”

I love to look at birds and to listen to them, but I am not a birder. I guess I’m just not all that interested in knowing their names. I know, I know, this is an intellectual failing, particularly for a writer, because if I want to communicate to you the experience of sitting under a tree in the Anza Borrego Desert listening to the birds in the morning it helps a great deal if I can name the birds I’m listening to. That way you could look up a sound recording and more closely understand my experience, I suppose. Also the names themselves are often beautiful: phainapipola. Morning Dove. Mockingbird. I know I should learn all the names. I used to just ask my buddy Nels. I’m incredibly lazy. He would tell me and I’d generally forget. Now I ask Jan. It is wonderful to love smart and studious people.

Mathew Arnold, (to me a pretty forgettable famous poet, one of those guys who is more talked about than heard from but…) once wrote somewhere that “birds are beside us, but alone” which I have to admit is nicely put, and the thing I like about birds, and probably what everyone likes about birds: that they are emissaries from some mysterious place. The ancient greeks apparently thought because they could fly, and because they disappeared for months at a time that they consorted with the Gods. That birds knew the Gods secretes. They are so delicate, this is the first thing you notice as a child when you hold a dead one is that they are so light, you think that their life must have had substance, they must have weighed more when alive to tough out the bad weather and the winds. I know when I first held a dead bird, I knew there had to be a soul gone missing from that body.

They sing. I love that. Also they squawk and gurgle and glonk, and quack, and rattle and caw, and all kinds of odd noises. Melody and dissonance, freeform and percussion. Power Pop and Sun Ra. It seems magical delightful and funny. I’ve heard brown bears, grunt, and fart and bellow, and snap and moan, and they have all had the same effect…somewhat or completely scary. Birds and Humpback Whales have it going on as far as non human vocalization, though I have to say I haven’t been around a lot of the great apes.

Of course they fly. They fitter. They hop. They stoop. They soar, They swoop, and glide, and perch, hover, zig, and zag, land in water, swim deep, burrow underground, balance on twigs, sleep on cliffs, and travel the length of the earth, both ways, without maps, or outside help that we know of… which of course is pretty fucking cool.

I guess when I sit in the sun and I look at the gulls I’m just pretty impressed. I can recognize an arctic tern and I do appreciate their unbelievable achievement in the length of their yearly migration. But I can’t really tell it from some of the other terns. I know it’s not a gull, but that’s about it. I should know how to identify all the gulls but I’m not so sure that it’s important to the terns and gulls that my respect is specifically that important. I just don’t want to sully the moment of considering the incredible miracle both biological, but that soul building moment that I am having just at that moment when the white birds are wheeling overhead, for Arnold may be right that they… the birds… might be alone, but when I consider this creature somehow, I am not so alone. I have some connection to the ancient Gods, and the fact that they don’t exist makes that connection, for me, all that much better.

Dot and one of our Zombie rhododendron.

Early Spring, so cold,

I warm my hands in your shirt

while you bite my lip.

jhs

Here is a recording I made today in my office. I read from a beautiful book The Hill of Summer by J.A. Baker. It was one of my friend Nel’s favorite books, and I read it too him when he was sick. I read a selection of a sparrow hawk flying over a summer field. It is a magnificent passage and my reading doesn’t do it justice.. I get a little emotional towards the end, and Dot is barking out on the porch, but still, particularly if you haven’t read J.A. Baker, you should give it a listen.

Learning To Take A Punch

Another beautiful day in the time of Covid-19. Clear skies and temperatures in the low forties in the afternoon, much colder at night and in the morning. Our hummingbird feeder is still frozen solid but I have heard a humming bird zipping around back in the shadows. Gulls are singing their spring song downtown where the long liners are bringing their black cod catch in. I saw a group of people, (six feet apart) cutting collars out of the black cod heads down on the waterfront yesterday. There was no herring fishery this year because there was no market in Japan apparently. The roe is generally given as a special gift during a spring celebration this time of year and it goes with large gatherings… which have all been cancelled. Many people in Sitka including the tribal members are just as happy that the fishery did not happen. The herring did spawn but not near town this year but further off shore of Kruzoff Island I was told. We will probably get some spawn inside a little later.

I wanted to remind any of you who would like to write to me you can do it here through the contact page and I wish you would. Please give me some feedback and ask me any questions you have. Do you like having daily postings now? Is it too much? Too little, in that the posts are too short? I know the recordings are not of the highest quality but I’m working on that. I may work up to having something like a pod cast but I’m not sure what that entails. I’m not really an entertainer and need to write. I find this blog is very time consuming for me but I have to say I enjoy it. Particularly now when I’m not really sure about the book I was going to write. It feels like the ground is shifting under my feet concerning that planned book.

My mechanical proficiency is not great as you can also see. But I would love to hear from any and all of you. I will try and write you back. Again I don’t respond to flamers, that is people who seem to enjoy being hateful. I will respond to genuine kindly expressed criticism to which I will respond graciously, and gratefully as long as I am not overwhelmed by other commitments. If I am, I will still get to you, it just may take some time.

Buds on the Cherry Tree I planted in 1982

Which reminds me. I often get questions from students who are working on research or homework assignments if they are in high school or middle school and of course I am honored and really want to help. It’s important that you tell me if you have a deadline so I will know to put it up to the top of my list for responding. If you write me late on Sunday and need it that night to hand in Monday morning. You might not get it, but you certainly won’t get it unless you tell me it’s a rush job.

Also, I’m sorry but I just don’t read long manuscripts unless we have a well established relationship. To ask me out of the blue if I will read your novel or recommend you to my agent if I’ve never met you or never read anything by you is unrealistic. (Trust me, this happens.) To read a full length manuscript and make useful comments on a eighty thousand word manuscript is to ask someone (or me at least) for more than ten days of full time work. At least. That’s not even line editing, that’s just me reading and making notes and sorting out plot, style, diction and basic editing suggestions. Most professionals would charge anywhere from five hundred to two thousand dollars for that service. It is just something that you shouldn’t do as a young writer. I know. I did it myself and I regret it to this day.

What I will do and have done is read your query letter and your query package that you want to send off to a publisher. Then you and I can work together on making it the best possible writing you can do. I can also read up to five pages of any of your work and tell you what I think.

But you should beware, I am blunt. If I don’t like it I will tell you so. And please don’t write to me if you want me to tell you whether you have what it takes to be a writer. Should you go ahead and make the sacrifices to keep writing? I happen to think that most people who write to me don’t really want to be writers, I think most people want to have creative and expressive lives and there are lots of great ways to do that without writing. I have told lots and lots of people to give up that dream. Writing is terrible job. It doesn’t pay well for 99.5% of the people that go into it. It is not all that satisfying for those that do find work. It’s more of a compulsion than a calling. The real question is can you stop writing?

I do know that writers, like boxers need to be able to take a punch. You shouldn’t like it, but you got to expect it and learn to take them. But the point is to win. Enjoy the game. Enjoy sitting down and doing it. If you do then you have your answer. If you don’t, become a cowboy, or a fisherman/woman or a detective, or a ski bum or a mountain climber.

But I know, there are some people that just write. They usually love to read, they might be like me, dyslexic and slow readers but they still love books. They love the dream worlds they create and the magic of how just the markings, the little scratches of black and white can imprint on your brain, stretching and pulling what feel like memories into brand new forms and create new stories that may have once been true in places that may have existed or things that never happened in places which could never have been real. For these people reading and writing is addictive. Now….you may or may not be addicted, but you CAN cultivate that addiction by just throwing yourself into it, which is what I did after I wrote two horrible and unsuccessful books, I told myself, “I don’t care if I’m a fake and a poser. I don’t care if I end up obese with six inch long fingernails in a filthy basement cackling that ‘No one understands me!’ I’m going to write one more book and I’m going to work on it and have tough readers, and I’m going to listen to their advice until I’m absolutely certain in my own heart that it is a good book. Then it doesn’t matter if it gets published or not. But at least I will know I did what I set out to do.” And it took me seven years, but I did, and the first place I sent it to published it and it won the best first private eye novel of the year. Not the pulitzer prize but not a poke in the eye with a sharp stick and not the lonely life in a basement apartment, either.

Sturdy Young Pine

One last thing from yesterday. I am not a class warrior. I just don’t believe in the supremacy of the individual. Society involves cooperation and cooperation required communal action and generosity of spirit. I simply feel and think we need more of that spirit now and we need to apply more generosity to more members of our community. That’s all I was trying to say.

Early spring,

nothing in bloom

but your red lips.

jhs

Here is a recording I made in a very quiet downtown Sitka this afternoon. No Dot, a couple of sloppy edits because I had to take two calls from Jan who was at the doctor. I read from my book Cold Storage, Alaska while sitting in the park during the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020.

The Different Kinds of Anarchy

More high pressure from the north but with a little south west wind so the temperature is up a bit from yesterday. In fact a very lovely spring day. I can almost see the buds on the cherry tree stretching out and so too on our hardy old rhododendron. We always buy a plant on Mother’s Day and sad to say we are at about a fifty percent survival rate, which wouldn’t be bad for a base runner in the major leagues but I don’t think it’s great for a gardner. Some of our rhodies are sticks now and have gone to bush heaven but others, by far the saddest are like bush zombies that refuse to die. They cling to life with a few blossoms every year and some sickly leaves with brown holes in them. Honestly it looks like we feed them brains. But the old grandmother seems to weather all storms and pushes out buds like a range cow will lay down calfs. Hardy stock that we somehow can’t manage to recreate.

We almost ran out of food so we went to the store, and laid in supplies. We did not wear masks but it was not crowded. There was plenty of T.P. except for the famous name brand which was cleaned out. There were no sanitary wipes nor hand cleaner, but we’ve been making our own, or making due with liberal application of ever clear on most everything. I did not see anyone wearing a firearm today. But many people stayed in their cars and people were bringing their groceries to them. Jan and I discussed this and as long as the store is uncrowded we wanted to pick out our own stuff, cutting down on the handling, we also brought our own bags which the store doesn’t like but we bag our own groceries. then clean the counter afterward.

I am more and more certain that we as a society are going to come out of this relatively intact, it would have disappointed our son as a young teenager, because he was really a fan of Zombie Apocalypse movies, but this isn’t it I’m afraid. No… we will survive without dead eyed brain eating ghouls and having to double tap them in the head with twin shotgun blasts to save ourselves from having our brains eaten...damn it. No. We will just have to stay indoors and watch a lot of TV and probably gain a bunch of weight.

But I do wonder what else will come of this. I can see several possibilities. One: we might finally see for certain that science has something to teach us about small numbers and big consequences.. We might embrace the fact that we can predict things from the little changes that happen now and how they become the big important things that will happen in the future. Like how you steer five degrees off course at first it’s no big deal but after a thousand miles you are really lost. Or if you have an in infection rate of three to one, that doesn’t sound like big numbers but they can become really big numbers in just a month. Holy Crap! So maybe we should listen to scientists about climate change and do something now when the numbers are still small?

That could happen. We could embrace science.

Or. Because we didn’t have a Zombie Apocalypse and we didn’t get to use our guns, all the worry was just a hype by pointy headed liberals, Trump hating scientists who are trying to do one thing: get more grant money off the backs of tax paying citizens who they look down their long condescending noses on. Yeah. Where’s the big deal? We all stayed inside and the only people who died lived in crowded blue states or people who traveled a lot or people who came in contact with those people, it was their own fault. We didn’t need to isolate, we just needed to be isolated from them the snooty travelers and “urban” people who chose to live in those foreign loving cities. They love that lifestyle let them have it.

That could happen too.

the railing to my office, what Dot hasn’t eaten.

There used to be at least two types of Anarchists in America. Now we tolerate one type. The right wing anarchist like Timothy McVeigh believes that the unit of measure of American society is one: the individual. This was a concept fed by Martin Luther and the reformation. The Catholic Church was corrupt and humans can seek their own individual relationship to God. Individuals can own what they want, can worship Jesus they way they want, they can buy what they want. This is the American way, and the Constitution meaning the Government is only meant to serve the individual.

There were earlier Anarchists in America who thought that the organizing unit of society was in the hundreds of thousands and they called it: Class. This came about even before Marx, and Engles mostly in Germany, with Baukaunin, and others after the beginning of the industrial revolution. Workers were inherently exploited by the wage system and their bosses. No matter what they were paid they would come out on the short end, because the bosses were motivated not to make fair compensation but to maintain their advantage over the workers. Their prime motivation was not even to maintain their wealth but to maintain their power over the workers and the poor. The only way to change this was to change the basic equation through social revolution. Hence the IWW: One Big Union. Big Bill Haywood. Helen Flynn. These early radicals, many from the northern mid-west, were more doctrinaire than the Russian Communists. They didn’t believe in wages. “We Are All Bosses” was their cry.

It is obvious this type of Anarchy was outlawed then and now. It was explicitly outlawed for a time. In 1919 a person could be jailed in Washington State for ever having been a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. When I came to Alaska in the late seventies there were old men tucked away on the islands of Southeastern Alaska who had fled Washington: refugees in their own country. Back then the great events were bombings, A bank bombing in San Francisco. Gunfights in Everett. A riot and lynching in Centrailia, Washington. These were all battles in the great class war. Today some old Reds might see this pandemic as a great battle in that age old class war. Rich and poor alike are going to die. Moviestars and Ballplayers are going to die. What’s your money gonna do? How are we gonna fight it? You need something from every body. You need to understand that there is a communal nature to society if you want to iive through this thing. WE ALL HAVE TO DO SOMETHING TOGETHER IF WE ARE TO SURVIVE. There is nothing more radical, nothing more in keeping with the principles of the IWW than that.

Of course, there are those who imagine that they can go hole up by themselves in the wilderness or their bomb shelter and ride it out. But most of them are going to have to loot the stores for pencils to write their manifestos and while they are there they might as well pick up some toilet paper and some bottled water.

CORRECTION FROM YESTERDAY: Yesterday I said that sheltering in place in Alaska was the law. Apparently that law has not been signed yet.

Ah yes… my desk.

Twigs by her deathbed,

I asked if she was worried,

“Why” she said, “will it help?

Today I recorded myself reading from the second of the Cold Storage books while sitting out on the windy beach. Dot was digging for clams and eating them whole.

The Essential Pandemic

Cold and blowing from the north. Twenty degrees in the lee. Dog poop frozen hard, nice to shovel up. I think the song birds have flown back deep into the woods because I haven’t seen them out in the open in a few days.

Over the weekend we planned to take cinnamon rolls around to friends and leave them on their steps. But then it turned out we had contact with a person who had had contact with a person who had just gotten back from a cruise and had not quarantined themselves. So we spent the afternoon cleaning all surfaces and clothes, and dog harnesses that person may have come in contact with… and of course I ate too many cinnamon rolls. Jeepers. Why don’t people just follow the rules. or at least tell us before they come by for a six feet apart dog walk.

We also had a Zoom conference with my four siblings which was more fun than I thought it would be. My sister in Seattle, Martha does not have a dog, and she is naturally quiet anyway so we didn’t hear much from her because there were a lot of people chasing their dogs around with computers yelling and trying to get them to do tricks which was kind of funny for a while. Then we promised not to talk about politics… a promise we immediately broke so our commuter was full of five squares of people yelling and complaining over the top of each other sounding like a video game on the fritz. We are an opinionated family. Then we all toasted to life by clinking our glasses against the computer camera which worked rather well. I was drinking ginger ale from a can which was not so classy but it was an hour earlier in Alaska which was how I defended myself. We plan to do it again next week.

The news makes it seem that some of the worst hit cities may be reaching the peak of their death rate. Is this how we define the light at the end of the tunnel now?

Alaska has a long history with epidemics. Small pox and diphtheria hit hard here before the Spanish flu. Entire villages were wiped out completely almost entire regions if I understand my history correctly. Small isolated communities have a special fear for these diseases for while it’s true we have a defense in the distance and isolation smallness and isolation makes us vulnerable when they finally do hit. Here in these places we have the traditional skepticism of the stranger. What might they be brining in? This comes from the days of the great sicknesses. The stranger could bring in something that was invisible and could cause a sickness that could carry away everyone… literally everyone in the village in the matter of weeks. Many old stories, many of the societal rules and clan structures came from this fear of the stranger.

Our little town of Sitka is about nine thousand people. We live on a big island but with no roads on or off. We live in relatively close quarters. Two grocery stores. One main street. one set of public schools. One main meeting hall in town. No one owns more than five or six acres of private land and most much less. Most people live on or near the water and measure their lots in square feet. We feel we are ready for the virus. The Governor has outlawed intrastate travel now, but he also cut ferry service down to about nothing. There are about 90 active cases in the state. None in Sitka. We have a regional hospital here, the public boarding school has been temporarily closed and there has been discussion of using the dorms for overflow beds if needed. We have a drive through testing center set up. Anyone flying home from outside now has to self quarantine for 14 days by law. Sheltering in place is also the law. All restaurants are delivery only. Bars are closed. Which is a big thing, my friend Brian heard that they were closing and he burned rubber down to the Pioneer bar to say goodbye to his social life for the duration. it was a genuinely sad affair. For many the bartenders at the P. bar are family. 9 thousand people. If one case comes and people are sloppy and just don’t care, or have the attitude that I have heard from some, “I’m going to be dead soon, I don’t care,” Or “Okay… I believe it’s real and al,l but I still think it’s being exaggerated by the people who hate Trump, so I’m going to live my life.” Or... the most frequent I’ve heard…. “It’s the flu. I don’t change my life for the flu.” If that prevails, one case becomes two, two, four, four eight sixteen… counting down to nine thousand. Then of course news gets out and people try to clamp down more on our freedom of movement and it’s harder and harder to leave town and fear kicks into panic thinking and panic thinking gets magical… like “God wants this to happen,” or “It’s like thinning out the herd,” So “I’m taking my boat to Seattle,” sounds like a good thing to do, then people jump on boats and boats sink and more crazy shit happens and airlines don’t want to fly people who might be carrying the virus to Seattle and people get a little crazier and well…

It’s bad. The little island town where it all seemed so good, Is crawling with crazy people with guns. I know, I’m not saying it’s going to happen. But I will say I’ve seen three guys openly carrying handguns in the grocery store in the last week and I haven’t seen that in times when it wasn’t hunting season before.

But you know me, I’m basically a Pollyanna, love will find a way kind of guy, and I honestly thinks that’s going to happen here too. I’ve seen crazy and they can have it. I can eat fish, pilot bread, doritos and top ramen and stay home until the people with the bull horns call me out of my hole in the ground, and when I come out, I’m going to plant a big old kiss on the first copper holding an AK-47 I see.

I recorded what I suppose is a lecture but is more of a meandering talk about that book, The Essential Haiku. Don’t be shocked when it ends abruptly at about 25 minutes. I was wrapping it up when a friend called who wanted to buy some flooring and it cut the recording. I haven’t learned to use Garage Band to edit recordings together and that is my pandemic project for this week.

What I would have said at the end of the recording is this: “I hope you are well, and if you aren’t well…. if you are sick, or worried about someone else… I hope you are with someone who can help you through it. Take good care of yourself, and stay well.

Dot was remarkably well behaved today so you don’t hear from her.

Freezing spray, north wind:

shivering in my pajamas

calling my dog home.

jhs