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July 19, 2009GO GO GOas Jack Kerouac urged Alan GinsbergOR FLOP FLOP FLOPMy friend Tom told me I’m either in Go Go Go mode or Flop mode. That’s me all over. After my Go Go Go trip to Oz, it’s been Flop Flop Flop back in Kansas (that’s how my sister-in-law characterized my return from La-la Land). I tend to crash off my high when I return from an exciting journey. I’m usually on my butt writing anyway. You can find me most days, most nights, on the couch, resting my laptop against my thighs, or scrunched in the corner with my feet tucked up. Rarely do I write sitting at a desk. Spent too many years at them earning a living. WHEN IN FLOP MODE,it’s hard to relate to myself in Go mode. When I’m conked out and look around at all the objects d’art I’ve picked up around the world, and consider the hours and weeks or months spent getting somewhere, exploring and bringing those items home, I don’t know how I ever had the energy to make it all happen. Scanning the living room from my prone position, I see a ceramic cow I got in Sweden, a horned mask with teeth from Copacabana beach, two leather Carnaval cat masks from Rio, an “@” espresso cup and plate I picked up in Ireland, a mask from Puerto Vallarte, plus the blanket I’m under, a wooden angel with tin wings from Seattle, an LED flower bouquet from San Miguel de Allende, a rustic bell from Tuscany, a mask from San Blas, a framed caricature of Jack Kerouac from Lowell, Massachusetts, two wooden arms from the American Folk Art Museum in New York, sticking out of a philodendron, and all manner of art and furnishings from my various lives in Philadelphia, Portland, OR, Whidbey Island, WA, Berkeley and San Francisco. IS SAN FRANCISCO IT?I’d like to think San Francisco is my home for all time, but to live in this city as a writer is no easy feat and I wonder what other lives I still have coming up, because when I bought a house in Portland in 1989 at age 34, I had this feeling of “OK, this is it! I’ve settled down.” I remember sitting on the bare floor of the empty house crying, thinking “What have I done?” It seemed like such a big deal at the time, like Portland was the end of my road. I lived there seven years, then moved to Berkeley and bought a little cottage (which came with a bonus fourplex apartment building behind it), thinking, “OK, this it! I’ve got my niche in the Bay Area housing market!” THEN, THIS BECAME THAT.Lived there seven years, up to my neck in debt with two mortgages, until the City of Berkeley notified me there’d be no cost-of-living rental increases for landlords that year and I erupted, “OK, that’s it! I’m out of here!” So I sold that and bought a two-BR flat in San Francisco and lived there five years until the cost of upkeep started to squeeze the life out of me. “OK, that’s it! Hell with this!” I decided money was not worth working for and sold the flat for the cash. Now I’ve been a renter for the past year in a little Mission Dolores one-BR, just me and my latpop, my top floor view, Zazu, Zzyzzy and Zahra. Maybe this is it! BUT NO—I just took a look at Laughing Squid and found a “Three Keyboard Cat Moon” T-shirt, about which someone commented, “that’s it. shut down all down. nothing will ever get more perfect than this.” Apart from there being no such thing as “more perfect,” there probably is no “it.” OK, this is it, I have everything I need now. OK, that’s it, I’ve had it with everything. Nothing is ever “it,” but just what you need at the time. There is no ultimate anything. Nothing is ever settled down. Not a marriage, not a job, not a home, not a life, not a country. Shit does happen. Cruel fate waltzes. Or it dances a sprightly jig! DAMN!I so clearly remember sitting at the Danish Modern table in the dining room of my childhood house on Camac Street, Philadelphia, on July 20, 1969, writing about the moon landing, but digging into the trunk under the bed, the earliest journal I could find was from December 1969. Wonder what the hell I wrote, at age 14. BUT I DID FINDthe 92-page notebook from that era of a draft novel about Beethoven-like composer Richard Christoph Bandecker, which was to be called Immortal Beloved (a mysterious unknown woman Beethoven wrote three love letters to). A movie by that title was later made, starring Gary Oldman as Beethoven. My idea was to pace the book according to the movements of the Eroica Symphony. I think Anthony Powell did something similar with Dance to the Music of Time. I was an ambitious young squirt.
Where’d I come up with that at age 14?
I was reading nothing but English novels at the time, I read almost all of Dickens, I think, and was addressing “my discerning readers,” with loads of parenthetical asides I today find ridiculous. LOVE!
I had an active imagination for a teenage virgin.
MUST HAVE BEENmy way of having an affair with Beethoven, whom I loved with a passion. And do.
What can I tell you, I was fuckin’14! SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH LUDWIGHow appropriate I should interrupt myself to attend the San Francisco Symphony performance of Beethoven’s Fifth in Dolores Park (down three blocks from me). Swan Lake, Romeo and Juliet, the Fifth, and, picked by the audience by texting, the Brahms Hungarian Dance No. 5, which won at 51% over Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and the William Tell Overture. Life without music, would it be worth living? We would soon reinvent it. And hurray! My personal pianist, John Beck of Delsbo, Sweden, is in town and just made a date with me to play the piano in my kitchen tomorrow. I actually bought it for him for when he’s here. I can practice, but I can’t play the damn thing. Rachmaninoff, Brahms, Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, ah, life is grand. A Yahama digital grand. |
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