The Day of the Tornado


Yesterday came suddenly, sang Paul McCartney all those years ago. I was 12 years old, no doubt watching "Wallace and Ladmo." Little beep, beep, beeps went up on the TV screen (if those weather system warnings on the bulletin bar on the bottom screen actually worked like that, back then). Hard to remember ...

I had just moved from Texas to the Country Estates subdivision at 58th Place and Shea Boulevard six days before. On the seventh day, the rain came.

Well, not so much rain. At least, not at first. The details of that day still linger. The visual impact the storm of 1972 created is still in my expressions better than any DVD could possibly replicate. Nearly 40 years ago now. Imagine. See it. Feel it. Almost smell it. The ozone in the days of Oz!

Back then a new plat in the Country Estates subdivision was like a cookie-cutter parcel of the moon. Sure, there was mesquite all over, but once the fences sliced-and-diced the place, all of the new back yards were, until the landscaper arrived, squared-off hotbeds of fine whitish, powdery dust. On that day or any other, the dust would get stirred up into swirls of volatile air, called "Dust Devils."

Arizona still gets "Dust Devils" now and then, but with the paradising effect that's gone on since these bad 'ol days, the name is being lost with all of the horny toads, rattlers and coyotes running for cover from civilization. Suddenly, it gets windy. Then, it's not. You'd hardly notice it. But on that day, June 22, 1972, the whole greater Paradise Valley area, basically the Indian Bend Wash basin, from Mummy Mountain to the McDowell Mountains, was a whirling set of such dervishes, a practical ballet performance, as weather patterns go.

Anyway, I tell this story to newcomers to Arizona a lot because it teaches something about the monsoons (which this wasn't) and the history of Scottsdale (a lost great body of knowledge that exists, if it exists at all, in the archives of the old Scottsdale Progress and the Scottsdale Historical Society).
The story doesn't actually begin with myself watching "Wallace and Ladmo," the old TV kids show, but with what I was doing when I came home as I was watching Wallace, and, of course, Ladmo.

He was mad about something, dad was. Not Ladmo and his Lincoln-esque top hat, where is Waldo shirt. He was upset, you see, because he just got back from talking to some insurance agent. The story begins when my dad said, right after coming through the door: "They wanted us to buy flood insurance. Those (bleeps!). Don't they know this is the desert?"

Country Estates is on the northern banks of the Indian Bend Wash. With the exception of a few golf courses, as it flowed to the Salt River, it was still a desert wash with mesquite and sage and rabbits and mice and prairie dogs. In the spring, lots and lots of butterflies. When it rained, even the slightest, downtown Scottsdale would be in need of Noah's Ark.

The next start of the story, after the beeping TV warning, after my dad's now famous last words, flows in this direction: Hail stones, the size of golf balls, plopping, puft, puft, puft, into super-heated, white hot dust. Then the wind came. Then came some more. Every dot of dust and debris not tied down flew by sideways by the windows, as if the Creator were converting the new suburban environment into something akin to a black day on Mars.

The roof began to wail. Fences picked up and were lifted off as wind sails in a scene from the black-and-white segment of "The Wizard of Oz."

Then, I look out the window, and saw a tower, a dirt vortex, well up into the sky, up and out of the frame, cascading off nearby Mummy Mountain.

Now, even before this, tornadoes have freaked me out. Sure, Dorothy's little house-spin into the air, up and back and down into Oz, always left a strong impression. But also this: Members of his grandfather's immediate family, including his mother and father, had been killed by a tornado in West Texas (and he had to raise his younger siblings by himself as a teen). So, fear of tornadoes is pretty much in the DNA.

So, what did I do? Run? Scream? Duck and cover? No. I decided to go outside and get a better view. Went through the front door. Looked up. It was a big, brown, swirling behemoth. Or, that's what the eyes, as dust bits pelted hid face and sandblasted my hair and my mother screamed "Get back in here!" - that's what my eyes still feel, see and remember.

There was no time to do the classic, heartland-style, get-into-the-cellar maneuver. No time to even get into the hallway, away from the windows. But by God's grace (as well as the seeming lack of it) the tornado hit the house across the street, destroyed a roof, killed their dog, hopped then over the entire Country Estates neighborhood, and then landed again, turning Shea Boulevard and points northward into a Vietnam era-, Robert McNamara-style playground pathway of near total destruction. Hundreds of homes had varying degrees of damage. Uncounted numbers were rendered, national-TV-news style, into images of flattened rubble.

Then, the winds passed. A half-mile away, looking toward Shea, a boulevard named after a Union General at Gettysburg, you could see nothing but the wrecked frames of bombed-out homes and flashing red emergency lights.

Then, it began to rain. In fact, it rained for a day. In fact, it rained four inches in four hours. The Indian Bend Wash became the Indian Bend River. It must have been a mile-wide muddy river, too. But our family never knew. We couldn't even step out of the door for three days as the wash, our street, now a river, flowed on by with every bit of debris and clutter it could pick up. A wash. Indeed! A major Maytag this so-called "Paradise Valley" will always be, say, every hundred years or so.

Now, we could go on and on about not having electricity or water for a week. Or, about how some official landed in a helicopter behind their house, looked around, and then left. How I believe it was the governor come to bless them with his utter and useless amazement. I could thank the Lord for sparing them but punishing the neighborhood with a kind of creative whimsy, and yes, a cosmic sense of timing and selectivity.

It was, after all, right after the first official day of the summer. You could talk about solstices and the equinox and all ...You could ask, why them, but not us? It would be futile, of course, unless you have lived it, to try to fully explain the impact of this storm on me, my family, and yes, this burgeoning city called Scottsdale. The number of times I have told this story to people:

The day we faced the tornado: I saw it in the window. Dust was blowing all around, saw it there, bigger than the black and white version in the Wizard of Oz. Him ran outside. Him remembers pinpricks of dust hitting his face and his mother screaming to get into the house. Him, big heap tornado boy, leaned into the wind. It ran hot and cold. The tornado high in view, A roof off a house down the street, and went back inside, barricaded in the hallway, or tried to, but there wasn't enough time. God knows what was running through him big father's mind because his father's family had been killed by a tornado in West Texas. All that is known is after the winds died down, after the new saplings were pulled out of the ground, after it seemed liked the wind picked up their back yard and deposited it somewhere west of their neighborhood ... the change had begun.





An excerpt from 'Forty Days of Fire, Forty Days of Rain,' a living novel by Douglas McDaniel:

There was an attempt, now complete, to save the world. Here are the results ...

Coming down the mountain, moving south, out of
Oregon and into the Jefferson valley, I could see the
clouds, wrung out by the winds, streaming across the top
of Mount Shasta, a white-capped behemoth overlooking
the region like a Himalayan monarch. Most mountains
do. They have that quality. They are monarchical. They
press against the sky and there’s no telling them
anything. They are in charge. We wait on them. They are
never pleased. Like the wind, they own the land, forcing
their will upon all inhabitants. And so on this day,
seabirds, white gulls of some kind (I wish I knew what
kind), were oddly trouncing around, sifting for food at
the road side rest site, placed like a dish of rest at the
mountain’s valley table. They seemed lost, as if the wind
had blown them there from far away. I asked the rest site
attendants, one was clearly retarded and the other one, a
Latino) if it was unusual for these birds to be there. The
retarded one mumbled something that was lost in the 50
mph winds. The Latino said the white gulls always come
in the summer. I thanked them and then walked away,
then realized: It was March.
The point of this passage was to get out of the rain.
And just this once, the sun burst through the clouds and
painted this valley in a way valleys are supposed to be
painted by the sun. Great broad clean sweeps of color.
At this rest stop along U.S. 5, I got out to take a piss and
a picture.
The wind was blowing hard, damn hard. I’d been
driving for six hours at least, after leaving Canyonville,
Oregon earlier that morning (a nice little place that I
eventually found a little disturbing, due to its bible belt
undercurrent that packed its more hermetic charms in
tight, its health food store, its cyber cafe, its large white
masons hall, all tucked in tight in a womb of paternal
Jehovah protectionism) and was about ready to go postal
about the weather. Really had had enough.
Six miserable months the storms, my sweeties, rendered
me into complete unreliable narrator-hood. Now, after
facing numerable challenges to my sanity as I have retraced
our steps to this dream of a life at the far end of
our continent, I have been reduced to madly running
through the Mohave desert in the cold and dark in order
to find a fucking telephone so that I could hear her voice
and know it’s going to be OK. But such assurances have
escaped me. Instead, after facing yet another horrible
Olympus on the road up and down the pass in
Tehachapi, California, where I determined the most
deadly foe to man isn’t the horror of nature, but instead,
the nature of the California drivers who hurl through the
world on some kind of high-octane hell without a care in
the world for who they run off the road, I descended into
yet another underworld to find I’m not worthy of this
mission.
Now, as I face this cracked mirror in a motel room in
Barstow, another place being cold-blasted by the hideous
wind, I am tortured by a lingering premonition ...





An excerpt from 'Forty Days of Fire, Forty Days of Rain,' a living novel by Douglas McDaniel:

Cardinals vs. Cowboys: One Man's Fan Psychosis at the Crossroads

My first memory of football was after we moved from Phoenix to Dallas in 1969 and while the whole family was taken on tour of the city, I recall the certainty and denial when we were asked if we would ever become fans of the Dallas Cowboys. We said, "No, no way." Being new to the city, we were stunned by the social importance put on the team. At that time the emerging Dallas Cowboys were led by quarterback Don Meredith, his favorite target "Bullet" Bob Hayes, and the original coach, Tom Landry. I knew very little about football at age nine. But I was as old as the team, which played its first season in 1960. My second "first" memory of the game was watching a local news clip on television of Meredith being swung around in full circles by a defender who had fully grasped his face mask. From that point on, I became curious about the game, about how much fun it might be to tackle my brother that way, and from then on endeavored to become (being somewhat big and brutal for my age) the next Bob Lilly, the Cowboys' Hall of Fame defensive tackle to be.

My mother, noting my new found fascination for Dallas Cowboy stickers, freebie drinking glasses at the gas stations and throwing neighborhood children across the front lawn, Bob Lilly style, decided to start giving me teen-read books about football. I read every one. Perhaps my mother wanted to channel my industries toward something less threatening, because I was very good at picking kids up and throwing them across the lawn, but at any rate I was taught to read by the run-for-daylight firelight tales of Vince Lombardi and the Green Bay Packer dynasty, of Gale Sayers and why it was important to get all verklempt about football with his book, "I Am Third." By 1972 (at the age of 12), I was reading the books about the Cowboys being written by the sports columnists for the Dallas Times Herald and Dallas Morning News, left to puzzle out the adult fundamentals about why Cowboys' running back Duane Thomas was personna non grata in terms of our dinner table discussions, despite his being a star, for refusing to speak to the press for an entire championship season, and why, exactly, receiver Lance Rentzel, my favorite player because he was married to Joey Heatherton, had exposed himself in public to a child at great scandal when he had such a pretty wife.

At any rate, perhaps pulling back from whatever other scary thing the world of the opposite sex had in store for me as a young teen, I decided to retreat instead to the safety of my bedroom, playing Sports Illustrated board games based on playing-card, play-calling tendencies interpretable by dice and colorful team charts. Then more football strategy games with whole playbooks of offenses and defenses, formations, deep routes, z-patterns, y-patterns, blitzes and zone schemes at my fingertips. With neighborhood friends by 1970 I was running entire proto-fantasy leagues on my own, keeping up to date stats and all, and maintaining newspaper, photo and cartoon clip file on the Cowboys by 1972. I was well past those electric boards that simply shook plastic pieces around. I was obsessed, and, quite good at certain kinds of limited math. And strategy. Football was clearly like warfare, especially the Civil War, with its cannonfire and facing fronts, and I loved military history. That, and, as I'd learned from my football books, how to look one way, move the hips the same, then shift fast to the other, running for daylight, leaving the neighborhood kids without socks, became my passion in life. By the time I had graduated from high school in 1978 I was perhaps the last teen quarterback of my era to be able to call my own plays in the huddle, knowing fully well, as any team that tried to upset the Cowboys always did throughout the 1970s, to run to the weak side and baby, throw on first down. Short of that, run around like Roger Staubach. I was no longer larger than my peers. Getting tackled or touched on the field was inconvenient, if not downright terrifying.

The third great "first" memory of football was growing up in Dallas during the Age of Aquarius as Texas Stadium was appearing before our eyes. First as a frame, then as an unofficial state religious monolith missing its roof. By the time the 1971 season had come around for its unveiling, the Cowboys had lost a Super Bowl to the Baltimore Colts, the strangely forgotten "Blooper Bowl," which ended 16-13. More importantly, the psychic catastrophe of that sudden loss with a field goal at the end crushed my 11-year-old dreams about the goodness of the world. The loss to the Colts pushed me into an era of magical thinking, and, superstition, about being interrupted while any Cowboys' game is on television. From then on, I was branded. That's because my parents had left to go to a Super Bowl party at halftime, and the 'Boys ended losing a lead to the Colts in the second half. I still haven't forgiven them for breaking the family concentration on that bloody afternoon. In the years to come, they would say the reason they left the hole in Texas Stadium was because God could watch the team from above. This is, of course, completely true. Although, in more recent years, it has become suspect for actually being God's gauge for signs of the looming Apocalypse, there was certainly something magic about the place for myself as a teen.

And the Cardinals? My earliest Cardinals' memory was a Monday Night Football whipping of the Cowboys by a 38-0 score. This made the Cowboys 4-3 in 1971. Their chances of returning to the Super Bowl were slipping away. Then, Texas Stadium opened, and the team caught fire, finally winning their first Super Bowl, defeating the Miami Dolphins. But the Cardinals were never much good in the 1970s, not until the Don Coryell years, when there was always a very good chance that, unlikely as it might be, St. Louis would just ruin the magic during one of those strange Sundays when the the evil redbirds could figure out how to pull off an upset.

Then, we moved back to Phoenix in 1972. I was a world a way from the Cowboys, but not really. That's because Phoenix, despite being closer to Los Angeles, was a key TV market for the Cowboys' roping of the entire sports media market for the Southwest, including Mexico. Living in Phoenix, until those pesky Cardinals came to town, was even easier to become a full-time Cowboy fan capable of watching most of the regular season games, then to warm up the family table at the holidays at the talk of their chances in the playoffs. Thanksgiving dinners were scheduled appropriately. My best men wore Dallas Cowboy grey at my wedding, shifted into position at the nod of the groom, their old quarterback and insane Cowboys' fan, all scheduled on a day when my heroes were not playing, as we all went merrily along living within the safety net of fan psychosis and superstition about a team about as likely to fail us as a sunrise. We had a Dallas Cowboys' shrine with autographs and photos of Roger Staubach. When necessary, I prayed to it. Came in handy for the "Hail Mary" pass to Drew Pearson to beat the Vikings, as well as Clint Longley's miracle pass to Pearson, again, to keep us from getting sick at Thanksgiving ... such as the case when Leon Lett ... Leon Lett ... No Leon! No Leon, No ... (sorry, can't got there right now) ...

Clearly, the most powerful talisman I had acquired was a piece of the original Texas Stadium "astroturf," which I rubbed furiously in key playoff moments against San Francisco. Yes, I had the Cowboy magic dialed in. Indeed, I personally conjured a demon from the sky to aid in an improbable Monday Night Football come-from-behind victory against the New Orleans Saints, in which the spirit entered the body of Randy White, who personally made it his mission for the rest of the game to go get the quarterback, take the football from him and score as often as time allowed. If such prayers weren't answered? Well, of course, we had to atone. Weren't living right. Renewed our vows: did our daily best to be better Dallas Cowboy fans. And, just like those interplanetary worlds before Spock and Kirk arrive to reveal how everything is incredibly FUBAR, it all seemed to work out fine. For a couple of decades, almost, total bliss.

Because, for a long time, the idea of the Cowboys missing the playoffs was almost unthinkable.

This broadband of magic cast from Dallas was completely destroyed, though, when the Cardinals came to Phoenix. Not because they were a good team ... to think they could be in a Super Bowl, of all things, ever, was just as unthinkable. But the Cowboys' magic now had to contend with the question always brought in by the suddence appearance of a challenger to any belief system: Would we ever become Cardinals' fans. Sure, by the time I was a newspaperman in Phoenix, I could stand on the sideline with a press pass a few feet from Ed "Too Tall" Jones. See Emmitt Smith disappear into the hole for the first time through my photo lens. But those early Dallas games against Phoenix, with the Cowboys' empire under Landry crumbling and the Cardinals being a kind of joke that nonetheless gave the silver star. These were games where half the people in at Sun Devil Stadium wore blue, the other half, red, for two decades consistently bringing that question, that split decision, to the forefront. But over the years the Cardinals could never create the magic, the sense of youth lost, or any kind of connection at all, by failing to produce any sign of anything you could actually believe in. Other than failure.

Until this year. During which many new Cardinals converts find themselves branded by a heartbreaking Super Bowl loss. The first you have it, then you don't, bug. The essence of love and, religious experience, most likely. That dream of getting the one dream of happiness you deserve back. With the Cardinals appearing to win, only to lose, to wake us from that impossible dream, is suddenly converted into the faith, the hope, for new possibilities. Of such cracked madness, inspired by last-second jolts of NFL electricity, emotional converts are made. Now I find myself once again hoping the Cards' can replace that Cowboys' riff that's as old as I am. Though there's still a chance that God only gave the Cardinals the power to move, mechanically, 120 yards of turf from inside their new stadium merely in order to fry their field in the flames of hell, that hole in the roof that gave God such a good view of Texas Stadium is no longer for rent by the team of my youth. Time to leave that old temple, head off to the desert, and pray for the best.





Get 'Forty Days of Fire, Forty Days of Rain,' a living novel by Douglas McDaniel:

An excerpt from 'Forty Days of Fire, Forty Days of Rain,' a living novel by Douglas McDaniel:

At the arrival of the storm, the front door to the
second-story condo blew in, since it faced the wind.
Giant trees somehow avoiding the buzz saw and dozers
in Central Arizona for a century swayed madly, and to
the good fortune of my own little endeavor in empirical
science, a string of multi-colored toy balloons (perhaps
the casualty of a Latino car dealership upwind in
downtown Phoenix) swished across my line of sight,
speeding by about one-hundred feet up: a perfect
weather balloon. I’d say it was doing sixty (even though
I can’t detect the red-shift and all). Conclusion: A big
storm was zeroing in on the southwest from L.A., across
the great desert through Barstow, but who really knew
with this paradised-out moonscape, this beige, maxed
out marketplace plain, with its golf courses and
manmade lakes and steaming foundations and swimming
pools? Could have been enough moisture around to
evaporate up enough for a couple of lakes of rain ... a
heat box for the fire.

Anything to keep my mind off the cautious company
I was living with, who, like my girlfriend’s cat, looked at
me as if she wanted me to die. Or rather, for me to go
away and let her die. She lived by the darkness of the
television light, in gloom, in defeat with selfpreservation
… a satisfaction of being only minimally
depressed within the perfection of her sphere, a void
onto itself … in a prescription haze….

Regardless, what the trees lack, the wind whispers.
Like a suburban monk, I was, making sure to keep a
light touch whenever I touched the landlord lady nurse’s
refrigerator as her rayo-light-TV obliterated the room
from it’s darkness, a flickering firelight of cop shows,
cop dramas, cops in love, in law … a very strong law
enforcement vibe and then yer off to bed kinda light and
white noise … And, me, talking about the weather: The
atmosphere of the southwestern desert struck me as
unearthly, as guided by angels. After growing up there, I
didn’t recognize it anymore. There was no antidote for
this mercurial snakebite. By the great nimbus beasts that
took shape in the late afternoons, the clouds taking on
characters with each gust.

There’s the dragon. There’s the wolf. The snaky front
with its long tail slouching across the desert, only to
explode into a microburst at five in the afternoon. The
archangels of global warming in full view, perhaps.
About as clear as the chemtrails, also over Phoenix, I’d
say. But I’m at a disadvantage. It’s hard to tell anymore
what the normal weather patterns are when you move
around so much. The sense of something supernatural, as
in moving by abnormal physical shifts in the sky, is a
feeling only enhanced by being pushed around by the
winds in life. I had just come down from Oregon, fresh
from a record season for rain on the Pacific Coast. Forty
straight days of rain, in fact. A record for January and
February in the deep misty wood along the shore that
drove men like Lewis and Clark into dreamy
depressions, in a place where the local natives thought
White Man mad to want to live there, a foul stenching
woodsy murk on a tsunami terrorized coast. Where the
winds shook the house, but nobody ever mentioned
anything about a storm the next day. Where the angry
seas at the 45th parallel pummeled the seawalls along
Highway 101, threatening to break through its lines
within the next century, not to mention the next 10 years.

She leans into the sea
keening a song
from the Madonna Disneyland
of the deep as hailstones
ring white pins honed from Hawaii
and a tide of low pressure
rounds up upon the shore
of the Forty-Fifth parallel,
a crowny curtain of thorns
Unknowing from the unquiet
slumbers of lost ships
still melting in icy currents
below the surface,
the seagulls scatter
and defecate upon her:
Rise, O rise, storms across America
Your plastic passions await you
as cars stream in from the Orient
and gas passes through your ports
of entry, pleased, as they are
from the total penetration
of the perfect plan
Star of India, our captains
catch colds in the bowlegged
polarities of warm seas
and freezing skies
The sun, well-timed,
is a clock-face ticking,
hidden from our view
America, may the tilted jet stream
blow a gale of Goth up your nose
May the ocean rise and plaster
a new continent where truth,
chased in the wind, wakes
the ghost dancers from
the Pacific to the Atlantic
Before the living dead can get out of bed
Shipwrecked sailors
found lost at sea
discovered homes
in their own faces,
in bindles of woody words
crushed to hand-length bits
After forty days of fire,
forty days of rain,
the northwesterly El Nino
sheared shanks of wind
off the Oregon coast,
then brought a low blow
to slap the soiled temples
of the City of Angels
Driftwood is piled b‘fore desire
against sandy beach stumps
and stop gaps, infinite and wise:
Infinity stopped here for a day,
a deluge for the dead,
so I could admire
our wood chips,
our broken bones
A winter-long wind shear
plucked the breath
from my pressurized lungs,
turning my fire to water.
I floated some, then burst,
mounted a floating oar
then sank into an orb
of sand
The sun, beyond the grey wail,
shaped a man inside here,
inside this calamity of clams;
one-part plastic,
one-part fishhook,
a bonny redwood mast,
a skull & crossbones flying,
walking the plank on dry land
without an anchor, who cares?
Setting these banalities
of life aside, let me perscribble:
Glass floats on the beach,
I've found, and the ebb-tide
of the avenues are a roar
of trucks in the rain
On Tuesdays, Great Food
is closed in a seaside town;
and what a tree lacks,
the wind whispers;
and loving couples
strand tennis shoes
on the frosty morning shores
as missiles are clicked
into load in the underground
caverns of Iran. Also this:
The electric truth sheds
the oil slick skin off the CIA
and sickened seagulls
reel in the ninety mile winds
and Pennsylvania miners
with black lung bibles
defuse the threat
with another tragic
mind blast
The sun goes up
and Mercury goes
into retrograde
as our satellite's
telescopic echo fades
and techno-pop
becomes the sea
in which we wade
The camera's eye
is just a catch
for this cuckoo cluck house,
our mourning latch
and what is least
is that which lasts
as buzzard gulls sift
through black morning trash
and I try to unlearn
this noisy cache
of highway moms
speeding by bullet blasts
and taxi driver Thanatoss plants
look like gods in camouflage pants
Glass floats on the beach,
it's endless, at last!
The end is coming near
and it's coming here fast
It's time to drink
from the pirate's flask
and toast a tune
to all of that glass,
to the sun, the sky,
the nuclear smash,
the currents, the past,
the pounding surf,
the manic search
for meaning and gas,
the molten glow,
the melting snow,
the rivers that run
through those who know ...
Glass floats on the beach,
the ebb is endless,
it's here, at last

We had arrived back like refugees, yes, and we
never quite got our feet back on the hot cement of
Phoenix, either. She called out to the sea when the
storms moved in, in full fury, to Tiamat, to the lost Gods
of the beaches, worn away, keening into the wind … like
the wind’s daughter leaning into the wake of a pirate
ship!

But this sense of disturbed timing goes back further
than that: to the fire in the sky. No doubt I was pushed
this far by a very last lick of sun that touched the planet.
But the first thing I have to say is I had a hard time
getting anybody to believe me. Seven years ago, maybe
a decade or more, by the time you read this: Our story.
The whole thing was too preposterous and prescient and
certainly my description of the event as “a lake of fire in
the sky” didn’t help at such things as counseling sessions
and divorce proceedings. In fact, I had a hard time
getting anybody to believe anything I said in those days.
Not about the lightning. The polarities. The dot-com bust
looming. The bloodbath to come … the one-click wars
to come: Ever since that period in 2000, the weather has
become preternaturally strange to me, just as I had
become preternaturally strange to other people. Clearly,
it was the ways in which I was trying to say these things.
Something to ignite a concoction in my head. Something
without a compass, without a needle to get a handle on.
My best friends then, usually women, said I seemed
haunted.

Especially after that concurrent histrionic state of
mind, due to the stolen election of 2000. The country
had been hijacked by a band of Skull & Crossbones
pirates. By 9/11 it was clear. Anyone could see. I lost my
job. Got a divorce. Refused to own a driver’s license.
Tried to get off the grid. Ran into the Colorado Rockies
dreaming of same fabled web site to make it all ring
clear, then ran back to Boston in time to find the world
at war, a nation pumped up by its delusions,
shadowboxing with an idea, an ancient Christian foe as
old as the Crusades. When the solar storm hit New
England in the fall of the year 2000, in fact, most likely a
series of storms, it appeared to me as having biblical
portents, but denial in those days of the Y2k craze was
strong. The world had just moved on. Any
prognostication about the dark days ahead was met with
derision by co-workers and family members. It was the
holidays, after all. Nobody wanted to think about it. The
election had finally done the work of a global stun gun.
The wrath of God stuff could be safely removed to
points of conjecture in the land of god and cannon, and
thus, put off for until now as back story spinning out of
control.

An excerpt from 'Forty Days of Fire, Forty Days of Rain,' a living novel by Douglas McDaniel:

I rush over to her condo. This is a moment that must be shared. The Senator John Kerry is prepared to concede. He will give no fight for Ohio, though in time we will learn there is something clearly wrong with the count. It seems fishy. The ballot machines have had their dials turned toward counting giving peace a chance as zero, pure evil as one. I rush over, in tears by the time I get to her door. The emotion of the fulminating moment pouring through me, just as it must be pouring through exactly half of the voting nation. She answers the door and we embrace, weeping madly: The whole world is done.
Within the hour we are charging up a shale rock mountain in central Phoenix and she is screaming at the creosote, the sky, the wide sky that never answers back. She runs ahead up the trail. Pissed off at everything. Including me. We had messed up on the previous night in terms of getting to the polls on time, and when she’d found they were closed, tried to start a personal insurrection with the poor tired blue haired women running the voting station in a community meeting room at a church in the Arcadia District, a predominantly Red voter part of town, maybe a mile, maybe two, from one of the homes owned by Senator John McCain in Paradise Valley, a town with a statue and unapproachable (in terms of, hah, pedestrian access) cactus and stone inlaid monument to the late icon of conservatism, Barry Goldwater. I’m afraid the blue-haired ladies are getting ready to call the cops, so I pull out of there as she fumes.
The mountain we are climbing now is just a mile away, too, and as we rise along the trail, which is now a sidetrack from the main thoroughfare as she apparently doesn’t want to be around any human being, we can see the rooftops of the fabulous rich down below us. They are reddish-roofed haciendas on sprawling properties, lush with swimming pools with small waterfall amenities, global greenery. They have the entire Phoenix Mountain Preserve for backyards. They are in excellent defensive positioning to insulate themselves from the rest of humanity. But now they are under assault from the rear. She is at the top of the peak now, overlooking the glory and security and shallowness of the rich and she’s throwing stones at these houses. The stones disappear in the sky. I join in. But the homes are still too far away. The stones, like our uncounted votes, disappear into the blue sky. We cannot hear the sound as the well-thrown stones land, harmlessly in the vertical desert below. So then she starts yelling at the city itself, at the state that never wants anything to change because it’s immune to war: Things are just too good. I join in.
Fuck youhoooooooooo! Fuck youhooooos! You fucking vampires! Fuck you all!

Arizona, I don't recognize you anymore
Your creosote roots lie beneath
the perfect piles of McDonalds parking lots

Arizona, an unequal symmetry
of rubble piles collect
Ten thousand miles from here
Arizona, you are responsible ...

The middle-aged businessman
with expendable income
sweats for pleasure
Arizona, when can I stop sweating?

I swear in the heat like a pizza oven

Arizona, you are a car part store
but you got no glass to see through
and the beige collection
of air conditioned caves
is conditioned to respond
in all the right ways

The forests are in ashes
as the governor gapes
from a helicopter high

Arizona, I can find no fluid,
no friend, nor car phone to lean on
for company
By GPS, you can find me in the living room,
darkly lit, with rayolight flashing
bible black blurbs

Arizona, not even Ginsberg
would gripe about your tripe,
so blurred with anonymity
hell hardly matters anymore
Arizona, my life's belongings
are melting in a storage facility
and there are more things that beep
here than I can count

Arizona, you haven't hassled me for a while
The world is flooding
as you dry up and blow away

Arizona, a kid almost got crushed in your parking lot
and I went to one of your social service buildings
and was amazed about how many homeless lurks
were sleeping in the lobby

Arizona, I can't get assistance at the cash register
and the mountains are closed, cats run free
and all the lizards are gone

Arizona, you are sucking in souls
I think you should battalion
the borders with snow

The apocalyptic dread is all over me. Inside my head. Surely now, we will be attacked again. Though Phoenix is a long way from the East Coast, where all of the terrorist mayhem took place four years before, my paranoia is running unchecked. We devise escape plans in case of attack. When the lights go out, are if the sky turns to fire and we somehow survive, the best plan is to walk north to the mountains since the automobiles and highways supporting them will be of no use. We will move to the mountains north of Cave Creek and Carefree. I know where there are springs and water and game to be had as we worry ourselves into a survivalist mentality since, after all, we are sure to be attacked again and if, say, the Palo Verde Nuclear Power station were attacked the winds would head generally northeasterly and if we went southeasterly … oh hell, a few days later, weeks, then a month past, and nothing happens, my swirling brain gets calm enough to get toward a more practical plan. Because, you see, we felt the real problem was our inability to mix with people in such a hotbed of conservatism where no change is necessary, where the stores are chockfull of goods, most people are fully employed, where hundreds and hundreds of SUVs continue, shamelessly from their daily grinds to their convenience stores and big box meatlockered retail hubs and back to their TVs at night to feed on channelized fear and gory, glorified entertainments.
To escape the city to seek like-minded souls in the presumably more stable confines of small resort becomes … a kind of solution we can both get behind … so off to the small towns we go …

~

The Bull Run Fire came to about my doorstep. Five miles east, wind in my face and the fire plume, a violet volcano was close enough to see the white washed coat of burned juniper to force the Saturn in the nostrils. It was burning as a series of full plumes on Hackberry Mountain, south of the Verde River Valley in Central Arizona. But the mountain and the nearby mesas appeared to fizzle out and dampen around a many shouldered beast of fire and smoke.
We had been living in the Verde Valley for six months, on the edge of BLM lands holding a good portion of the General Crook Trail as it wound its way up to the Plateau. Then a major fire, started in Carefree maybe 60 to 80 miles south as the crow flies from the easterly banks of the Verde River, as it flowed to the desert canyons north of Phoenix. Big suckerfish Phoenix. We had escaped, but not for long. The fire started at some high-end hacianda had come all this way up and over and across the mountains, burning great fields of sage and juniper and sajuaro; the mountains of central Arizona blackened, from highway to shining highway,, burning more than 100,000 acres. As the smoke climbed onto the ridge, we went home and made a list of what we would need when the call for evacuation came, feeling a strange craving disaster to bring the memories awake, the dreaming down as great thin-legged clouds spiderwalk across the purple ridge, purple with weather, as our precious things shake in their cupboard, and nostalgia elucidates the decision making process.
Lightning pounds the mesas and the wind pushes down in atomic bundles and white orange flares of violence; A curtain on the sun is a dirty window of light, as we blow out compressed desires, pressing the sky, re-animating us.

The popular angst over AIG

The national outcry this week over the AIG executives receiving bonuses creates a nagging sensibility that I can’t just seem to shake. For some reason, it’s more bothersome than the Halliburton fiasco. Now, there is no bone in my body that believes I could rationally explain the AIG situation to you, dear reader, although I’m sure there are people on this earth who think they have a full grasp of the situation and are in the control room, right now, trying to fix that mess. Maybe ... the ability to fix it part, I mean … the world is just too full of people who think they have the answers and they are complete idiots for believing so ...

But for the rest of us, all we really share is a most profound sense of mystery. We watch the responses on television from our elected and appointed officials. These responses redouble the failures in common sense, thus increasing the sense of mystery and angst about how millions of dollars in bonuses can fall on the so far anonymous executives at AIG. The highlight among these folks was Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, who thought the AIG executives who took the bonuses should kill themselves.

Later, he apologized for that statement. But he was only voicing the popular consensus against these lucky bastards, who almost brought the economy to ruin, were rewarded so handsomely for their apparent failures.
Compared to other situations … for example, how can the New York Yankees not win the World Series every year with a payroll of maybe a half-billion dollars … shouldn’t they give the money back? … Why should anyone win $1 million on “Survivor” for being the most dishonest, cutthroat asshole on the show … Oh yeah, Halliburton … and that Bridge to Nowhere … but there’s clearly something paranormal about this AIG bonus issue that is really bringing people together.

The Obama Administration is going to send a strongly worded letter to the AIG executives, asking they give the money back. This doesn’t sound workable, to me, but hey, it’s worth a try. I’m sure most of us would send a check for $1 million back if we received one in the mail if we were asked, politely, to do so. Especially after the monkeys began to fly out of our arses.

Despite the sweetly amusing hopelessness of that cause, there’s still one more class of individual who must receive a most gracious notice … before I get to the actual point I’d like to make: The Republican response. All of the events leading to this week occurred, in fact, during the Bush administration. The contracts. The bailouts. Everything.

But still we see them on TV, trying to pin it on Obama, who hadn’t been elected yet, and was only partially responsible for the entire bailout package last fall … although I seem to recall Sen. John McCain trying to take credit for leading the charge on that one …

Yet, now that I’ve gotten these surface observations off my chest … at least in tune to my own flawed poetic sensibilities … I can find something positive about the whole bailout mess. Finally, after all, there is some maintenance going on with my most immediate city environment with these bailouts, my TV tells me … because the deep science of this is that, like some solution to an imbalance in the subatomic world, we need a healthy AIG to keep the heart of the demiurge a-poundin’ … but more than that, the national outrage is focused on something it can actually do something about … other than terrorism … asking a couple a hundred executive assholes to have common sense. Not that I believe they ever will. It’s this newfound desire for common sense … after an age of anything but … that’s what’s giving me hope.




Paradigm Lost, Journalism Unbound

They are falling like trees made ill from the insides by bark beetles. But the destruction is self-induced. Major newspapers are going out of business because they are no longer convincing bridges between man, his nature and his history. While declines in advertising lineage and the energy costs of distribution of flattened out brittle-bricks of newsprint to their readers became too expensive to support these institutions, these are perhaps only last straws, fatal blows at precisely the wrong time, swan song signs of an overrun paradigm lost. Those financial facts are merely condemning occurrences upon structures built with unstable codes and limited belief systems about what it means to communicate fully. They became like pencils. Or, horse-drawn wagons. Obviously. Obviously.

Who has a sharpener anymore, anyway?

The major dailies, built upon a sense of objective reporting, could no longer be considered as virtuosos of realistic detail. While the internet ran off its mouth like a prairie fire of subjectivity and emotional observations of history in real time, newsprint became more and more obvious each day as the dinosaur trying to chase the lightning bolt across the sky. Instead of maintaining a sense of themselves as vehicles for accurate perceptions of reality, the internet gave a glimpse behind this false projection like Toto sniffing around the curtain for the phony Wizard of Oz.

Now, as major dailies fall like burning towers from city to city, editors and publishers are being sought out for comment. But their views cannot be trusted. If they actually knew what was going on, for example, if they say that perhaps if classified advertising had remained, um, classified to newsprint publishing alone, then all of this could have been avoided: well, that just doesn’t fly. Like anything else that enters a period of decline, they are just creatures of denial. We are actually no more able to discern the full sensibility and causality of decline than a newspaper article can still concoct itself as an accurate replication of reality. Media literate Americans, caught flying down freeways for longer and longer periods of their waking days and unable to reach for their newspapers, have chosen (are forced, more like) instead to absorb information in far more varied ways, leaving their newsprint antiques on the shelves, on their porches or on their coffee tables unread, where they remain daily, weekly, always challenged by the other numerous new ports for media.

Newspapers became saltine crackers served to a populace dying of thirst. So if there’s any good news, it depends upon our ability to find a new diet, and that requires becoming more savvy about the impacts of media in general.
For example, I don’t buy that we are less literate due to these events; that democracy is imperiled without these stanchions of objective reporting to save us from authoritarianism. The sober, unsigned editorial became far less effective as an object for social change or preservation than, say, 100,000 raving bloggers creating an emerging consensus on the very same topic. The daily newspaper, it could be argued, was just a group-think tool for the autocrat, as supporting dicta for supposedly right-thinking morality (just as local TV news broadcasts are mere tsk, tsk mouthpieces for law enforcement activities caught on videotape). Like I said, objectivity was always a false presumption.

In the decade-plus since the internet has become a popularized reflection of reality, it also nonetheless fails in that category, but the general sense for this, too, has yet to be realized en masse. The internet is now perceived as the projection of immediate reality, but once again, it’s no more effective for that than the poet crowing from the hilltops, as far as I can tell. But, perhaps, the good news is this: That reporter, once hamstrung by the dictates of their journalism dads striking out words the observer wishes he or she could print, is now free to include every thought along the way.



An excerpt from 'Forty Days of Fire, Forty Days of Rain,' a living novel by Douglas McDaniel:

I rush over to her condo. This is a moment that must be shared. The Senator John Kerry is prepared to concede. He will give no fight for Ohio, though in time we will learn there is something clearly wrong with the count. It seems fishy. The ballot machines have had their dials turned toward counting giving peace a chance as zero, pure evil as one. I rush over, in tears by the time I get to her door. The emotion of the fulminating moment pouring through me, just as it must be pouring through exactly half of the voting nation. She answers the door and we embrace, weeping madly: The whole world is done.
Within the hour we are charging up a shale rock mountain in central Phoenix and she is screaming at the creosote, the sky, the wide sky that never answers back. She runs ahead up the trail. Pissed off at everything. Including me. We had messed up on the previous night in terms of getting to the polls on time, and when she’d found they were closed, tried to start a personal insurrection with the poor tired blue haired women running the voting station in a community meeting room at a church in the Arcadia District, a predominantly Red voter part of town, maybe a mile, maybe two, from one of the homes owned by Senator John McCain in Paradise Valley, a town with a statue and unapproachable (in terms of, hah, pedestrian access) cactus and stone inlaid monument to the late icon of conservatism, Barry Goldwater. I’m afraid the blue-haired ladies are getting ready to call the cops, so I pull out of there as she fumes.
The mountain we are climbing now is just a mile away, too, and as we rise along the trail, which is now a sidetrack from the main thoroughfare as she apparently doesn’t want to be around any human being, we can see the rooftops of the fabulous rich down below us. They are reddish-roofed haciendas on sprawling properties, lush with swimming pools with small waterfall amenities, global greenery. They have the entire Phoenix Mountain Preserve for backyards. They are in excellent defensive positioning to insulate themselves from the rest of humanity. But now they are under assault from the rear. She is at the top of the peak now, overlooking the glory and security and shallowness of the rich and she’s throwing stones at these houses. The stones disappear in the sky. I join in. But the homes are still too far away. The stones, like our uncounted votes, disappear into the blue sky. We cannot hear the sound as the well-thrown stones land, harmlessly in the vertical desert below. So then she starts yelling at the city itself, at the state that never wants anything to change because it’s immune to war: Things are just too good. I join in.
Fuck youhoooooooooo! Fuck youhooooos! You fucking vampires! Fuck you all!

Arizona, I don't recognize you anymore
Your creosote roots lie beneath
the perfect piles of McDonalds parking lots

Arizona, an unequal symmetry
of rubble piles collect
Ten thousand miles from here
Arizona, you are responsible ...

The middle-aged businessman
with expendable income
sweats for pleasure
Arizona, when can I stop sweating?

I swear in the heat like a pizza oven

Arizona, you are a car part store
but you got no glass to see through
and the beige collection
of air conditioned caves
is conditioned to respond
in all the right ways

The forests are in ashes
as the governor gapes
from a helicopter high

Arizona, I can find no fluid,
no friend, nor car phone to lean on
for company
By GPS, you can find me in the living room,
darkly lit, with rayolight flashing
bible black blurbs

Arizona, not even Ginsberg
would gripe about your tripe,
so blurred with anonymity
hell hardly matters anymore
Arizona, my life's belongings
are melting in a storage facility
and there are more things that beep
here than I can count

Arizona, you haven't hassled me for a while
The world is flooding
as you dry up and blow away

Arizona, a kid almost got crushed in your parking lot
and I went to one of your social service buildings
and was amazed about how many homeless lurks
were sleeping in the lobby

Arizona, I can't get assistance at the cash register
and the mountains are closed, cats run free
and all the lizards are gone

Arizona, you are sucking in souls
I think you should battalion
the borders with snow

The apocalyptic dread is all over me. Inside my head. Surely now, we will be attacked again. Though Phoenix is a long way from the East Coast, where all of the terrorist mayhem took place four years before, my paranoia is running unchecked. We devise escape plans in case of attack. When the lights go out, are if the sky turns to fire and we somehow survive, the best plan is to walk north to the mountains since the automobiles and highways supporting them will be of no use. We will move to the mountains north of Cave Creek and Carefree. I know where there are springs and water and game to be had as we worry ourselves into a survivalist mentality since, after all, we are sure to be attacked again and if, say, the Palo Verde Nuclear Power station were attacked the winds would head generally northeasterly and if we went southeasterly … oh hell, a few days later, weeks, then a month past, and nothing happens, my swirling brain gets calm enough to get toward a more practical plan. Because, you see, we felt the real problem was our inability to mix with people in such a hotbed of conservatism where no change is necessary, where the stores are chockfull of goods, most people are fully employed, where hundreds and hundreds of SUVs continue, shamelessly from their daily grinds to their convenience stores and big box meatlockered retail hubs and back to their TVs at night to feed on channelized fear and gory, glorified entertainments.
To escape the city to seek like-minded souls in the presumably more stable confines of small resort becomes … a kind of solution we can both get behind … so off to the small towns we go …

~

The Bull Run Fire came to about my doorstep. Five miles east, wind in my face and the fire plume, a violet volcano was close enough to see the white washed coat of burned juniper to force the Saturn in the nostrils. It was burning as a series of full plumes on Hackberry Mountain, south of the Verde River Valley in Central Arizona. But the mountain and the nearby mesas appeared to fizzle out and dampen around a many shouldered beast of fire and smoke.
We had been living in the Verde Valley for six months, on the edge of BLM lands holding a good portion of the General Crook Trail as it wound its way up to the Plateau. Then a major fire, started in Carefree maybe 60 to 80 miles south as the crow flies from the easterly banks of the Verde River, as it flowed to the desert canyons north of Phoenix. Big suckerfish Phoenix. We had escaped, but not for long. The fire started at some high-end hacianda had come all this way up and over and across the mountains, burning great fields of sage and juniper and sajuaro; the mountains of central Arizona blackened, from highway to shining highway,, burning more than 100,000 acres. As the smoke climbed onto the ridge, we went home and made a list of what we would need when the call for evacuation came, feeling a strange craving disaster to bring the memories awake, the dreaming down as great thin-legged clouds spiderwalk across the purple ridge, purple with weather, as our precious things shake in their cupboard, and nostalgia elucidates the decision making process.
Lightning pounds the mesas and the wind pushes down in atomic bundles and white orange flares of violence; A curtain on the sun is a dirty window of light, as we blow out compressed desires, pressing the sky, re-animating us.

Paradigm Lost, Journalism Unbound

They are falling like trees made ill from the insides by bark beetles. But the destruction is self-induced. Major newspapers are going out of business because they are no longer convincing bridges between man, his nature and his history. While declines in advertising lineage and the energy costs of distribution of flattened out brittle-bricks of newsprint to their readers became too expensive to support these institutions, these are perhaps only last straws, fatal blows at precisely the wrong time, swan song signs of an overrun paradigm lost. Those financial facts are merely condemning occurrences upon structures built with unstable codes and limited belief systems about what it means to communicate fully. They became like pencils. Or, horse-drawn wagons. Obviously. Obviously.

Who has a sharpener anymore, anyway?

The major dailies, built upon a sense of objective reporting, could no longer be considered as virtuosos of realistic detail. While the internet ran off its mouth like a prairie fire of subjectivity and emotional observations of history in real time, newsprint became more and more obvious each day as the dinosaur trying to chase the lightning bolt across the sky. Instead of maintaining a sense of themselves as vehicles for accurate perceptions of reality, the internet gave a glimpse behind this false projection like Toto sniffing around the curtain for the phony Wizard of Oz.

Now, as major dailies fall like burning towers from city to city, editors and publishers are being sought out for comment. But their views cannot be trusted. If they actually knew what was going on, for example, if they say that perhaps if classified advertising had remained, um, classified to newsprint publishing alone, then all of this could have been avoided: well, that just doesn’t fly. Like anything else that enters a period of decline, they are just creatures of denial. We are actually no more able to discern the full sensibility and causality of decline than a newspaper article can still concoct itself as an accurate replication of reality. Media literate Americans, caught flying down freeways for longer and longer periods of their waking days and unable to reach for their newspapers, have chosen (are forced, more like) instead to absorb information in far more varied ways, leaving their newsprint antiques on the shelves, on their porches or on their coffee tables unread, where they remain daily, weekly, always challenged by the other numerous new ports for media.

Newspapers became saltine crackers served to a populace dying of thirst. So if there’s any good news, it depends upon our ability to find a new diet, and that requires becoming more savvy about the impacts of media in general.
For example, I don’t buy that we are less literate due to these events; that democracy is imperiled without these stanchions of objective reporting to save us from authoritarianism. The sober, unsigned editorial became far less effective as an object for social change or preservation than, say, 100,000 raving bloggers creating an emerging consensus on the very same topic. The daily newspaper, it could be argued, was just a group-think tool for the autocrat, as supporting dicta for supposedly right-thinking morality (just as local TV news broadcasts are mere tsk, tsk mouthpieces for law enforcement activities caught on videotape). Like I said, objectivity was always a false presumption.

In the decade-plus since the internet has become a popularized reflection of reality, it also nonetheless fails in that category, but the general sense for this, too, has yet to be realized en masse. The internet is now perceived as the projection of immediate reality, but once again, it’s no more effective for that than the poet crowing from the hilltops, as far as I can tell. But, perhaps, the good news is this: That reporter, once hamstrung by the dictates of their journalism dads striking out words the observer wishes he or she could print, is now free to include every thought along the way.



An excerpt from 'Forty Days of Fire, Forty Days of Rain,' a living novel by Douglas McDaniel:

I rush over to her condo. This is a moment that must be shared. The Senator John Kerry is prepared to concede. He will give no fight for Ohio, though in time we will learn there is something clearly wrong with the count. It seems fishy. The ballot machines have had their dials turned toward counting giving peace a chance as zero, pure evil as one. I rush over, in tears by the time I get to her door. The emotion of the fulminating moment pouring through me, just as it must be pouring through exactly half of the voting nation. She answers the door and we embrace, weeping madly: The whole world is done.
Within the hour we are charging up a shale rock mountain in central Phoenix and she is screaming at the creosote, the sky, the wide sky that never answers back. She runs ahead up the trail. Pissed off at everything. Including me. We had messed up on the previous night in terms of getting to the polls on time, and when she’d found they were closed, tried to start a personal insurrection with the poor tired blue haired women running the voting station in a community meeting room at a church in the Arcadia District, a predominantly Red voter part of town, maybe a mile, maybe two, from one of the homes owned by Senator John McCain in Paradise Valley, a town with a statue and unapproachable (in terms of, hah, pedestrian access) cactus and stone inlaid monument to the late icon of conservatism, Barry Goldwater. I’m afraid the blue-haired ladies are getting ready to call the cops, so I pull out of there as she fumes.
The mountain we are climbing now is just a mile away, too, and as we rise along the trail, which is now a sidetrack from the main thoroughfare as she apparently doesn’t want to be around any human being, we can see the rooftops of the fabulous rich down below us. They are reddish-roofed haciendas on sprawling properties, lush with swimming pools with small waterfall amenities, global greenery. They have the entire Phoenix Mountain Preserve for backyards. They are in excellent defensive positioning to insulate themselves from the rest of humanity. But now they are under assault from the rear. She is at the top of the peak now, overlooking the glory and security and shallowness of the rich and she’s throwing stones at these houses. The stones disappear in the sky. I join in. But the homes are still too far away. The stones, like our uncounted votes, disappear into the blue sky. We cannot hear the sound as the well-thrown stones land, harmlessly in the vertical desert below. So then she starts yelling at the city itself, at the state that never wants anything to change because it’s immune to war: Things are just too good. I join in.
Fuck youhoooooooooo! Fuck youhooooos! You fucking vampires! Fuck you all!

Arizona, I don't recognize you anymore
Your creosote roots lie beneath
the perfect piles of McDonalds parking lots

Arizona, an unequal symmetry
of rubble piles collect
Ten thousand miles from here
Arizona, you are responsible ...

The middle-aged businessman
with expendable income
sweats for pleasure
Arizona, when can I stop sweating?

I swear in the heat like a pizza oven

Arizona, you are a car part store
but you got no glass to see through
and the beige collection
of air conditioned caves
is conditioned to respond
in all the right ways

The forests are in ashes
as the governor gapes
from a helicopter high

Arizona, I can find no fluid,
no friend, nor car phone to lean on
for company
By GPS, you can find me in the living room,
darkly lit, with rayolight flashing
bible black blurbs

Arizona, not even Ginsberg
would gripe about your tripe,
so blurred with anonymity
hell hardly matters anymore
Arizona, my life's belongings
are melting in a storage facility
and there are more things that beep
here than I can count

Arizona, you haven't hassled me for a while
The world is flooding
as you dry up and blow away

Arizona, a kid almost got crushed in your parking lot
and I went to one of your social service buildings
and was amazed about how many homeless lurks
were sleeping in the lobby

Arizona, I can't get assistance at the cash register
and the mountains are closed, cats run free
and all the lizards are gone

Arizona, you are sucking in souls
I think you should battalion
the borders with snow

The apocalyptic dread is all over me. Inside my head. Surely now, we will be attacked again. Though Phoenix is a long way from the East Coast, where all of the terrorist mayhem took place four years before, my paranoia is running unchecked. We devise escape plans in case of attack. When the lights go out, are if the sky turns to fire and we somehow survive, the best plan is to walk north to the mountains since the automobiles and highways supporting them will be of no use. We will move to the mountains north of Cave Creek and Carefree. I know where there are springs and water and game to be had as we worry ourselves into a survivalist mentality since, after all, we are sure to be attacked again and if, say, the Palo Verde Nuclear Power station were attacked the winds would head generally northeasterly and if we went southeasterly … oh hell, a few days later, weeks, then a month past, and nothing happens, my swirling brain gets calm enough to get toward a more practical plan. Because, you see, we felt the real problem was our inability to mix with people in such a hotbed of conservatism where no change is necessary, where the stores are chockfull of goods, most people are fully employed, where hundreds and hundreds of SUVs continue, shamelessly from their daily grinds to their convenience stores and big box meatlockered retail hubs and back to their TVs at night to feed on channelized fear and gory, glorified entertainments.
To escape the city to seek like-minded souls in the presumably more stable confines of small resort becomes … a kind of solution we can both get behind … so off to the small towns we go …

~

The Bull Run Fire came to about my doorstep. Five miles east, wind in my face and the fire plume, a violet volcano was close enough to see the white washed coat of burned juniper to force the Saturn in the nostrils. It was burning as a series of full plumes on Hackberry Mountain, south of the Verde River Valley in Central Arizona. But the mountain and the nearby mesas appeared to fizzle out and dampen around a many shouldered beast of fire and smoke.
We had been living in the Verde Valley for six months, on the edge of BLM lands holding a good portion of the General Crook Trail as it wound its way up to the Plateau. Then a major fire, started in Carefree maybe 60 to 80 miles south as the crow flies from the easterly banks of the Verde River, as it flowed to the desert canyons north of Phoenix. Big suckerfish Phoenix. We had escaped, but not for long. The fire started at some high-end hacianda had come all this way up and over and across the mountains, burning great fields of sage and juniper and sajuaro; the mountains of central Arizona blackened, from highway to shining highway,, burning more than 100,000 acres. As the smoke climbed onto the ridge, we went home and made a list of what we would need when the call for evacuation came, feeling a strange craving disaster to bring the memories awake, the dreaming down as great thin-legged clouds spiderwalk across the purple ridge, purple with weather, as our precious things shake in their cupboard, and nostalgia elucidates the decision making process.
Lightning pounds the mesas and the wind pushes down in atomic bundles and white orange flares of violence; A curtain on the sun is a dirty window of light, as we blow out compressed desires, pressing the sky, re-animating us.

An excerpt from 'Forty Days of Fire, Forty Days of Rain,' a living novel by Douglas McDaniel:

I rush over to her condo. This is a moment that must be shared. The Senator John Kerry is prepared to concede. He will give no fight for Ohio, though in time we will learn there is something clearly wrong with the count. It seems fishy. The ballot machines have had their dials turned toward counting giving peace a chance as zero, pure evil as one. I rush over, in tears by the time I get to her door. The emotion of the fulminating moment pouring through me, just as it must be pouring through exactly half of the voting nation. She answers the door and we embrace, weeping madly: The whole world is done.
Within the hour we are charging up a shale rock mountain in central Phoenix and she is screaming at the creosote, the sky, the wide sky that never answers back. She runs ahead up the trail. Pissed off at everything. Including me. We had messed up on the previous night in terms of getting to the polls on time, and when she’d found they were closed, tried to start a personal insurrection with the poor tired blue haired women running the voting station in a community meeting room at a church in the Arcadia District, a predominantly Red voter part of town, maybe a mile, maybe two, from one of the homes owned by Senator John McCain in Paradise Valley, a town with a statue and unapproachable (in terms of, hah, pedestrian access) cactus and stone inlaid monument to the late icon of conservatism, Barry Goldwater. I’m afraid the blue-haired ladies are getting ready to call the cops, so I pull out of there as she fumes.
The mountain we are climbing now is just a mile away, too, and as we rise along the trail, which is now a sidetrack from the main thoroughfare as she apparently doesn’t want to be around any human being, we can see the rooftops of the fabulous rich down below us. They are reddish-roofed haciendas on sprawling properties, lush with swimming pools with small waterfall amenities, global greenery. They have the entire Phoenix Mountain Preserve for backyards. They are in excellent defensive positioning to insulate themselves from the rest of humanity. But now they are under assault from the rear. She is at the top of the peak now, overlooking the glory and security and shallowness of the rich and she’s throwing stones at these houses. The stones disappear in the sky. I join in. But the homes are still too far away. The stones, like our uncounted votes, disappear into the blue sky. We cannot hear the sound as the well-thrown stones land, harmlessly in the vertical desert below. So then she starts yelling at the city itself, at the state that never wants anything to change because it’s immune to war: Things are just too good. I join in.
Fuck youhoooooooooo! Fuck youhooooos! You fucking vampires! Fuck you all!

Arizona, I don't recognize you anymore
Your creosote roots lie beneath
the perfect piles of McDonalds parking lots

Arizona, an unequal symmetry
of rubble piles collect
Ten thousand miles from here
Arizona, you are responsible ...

The middle-aged businessman
with expendable income
sweats for pleasure
Arizona, when can I stop sweating?

I swear in the heat like a pizza oven

Arizona, you are a car part store
but you got no glass to see through
and the beige collection
of air conditioned caves
is conditioned to respond
in all the right ways

The forests are in ashes
as the governor gapes
from a helicopter high

Arizona, I can find no fluid,
no friend, nor car phone to lean on
for company
By GPS, you can find me in the living room,
darkly lit, with rayolight flashing
bible black blurbs

Arizona, not even Ginsberg
would gripe about your tripe,
so blurred with anonymity
hell hardly matters anymore
Arizona, my life's belongings
are melting in a storage facility
and there are more things that beep
here than I can count

Arizona, you haven't hassled me for a while
The world is flooding
as you dry up and blow away

Arizona, a kid almost got crushed in your parking lot
and I went to one of your social service buildings
and was amazed about how many homeless lurks
were sleeping in the lobby

Arizona, I can't get assistance at the cash register
and the mountains are closed, cats run free
and all the lizards are gone

Arizona, you are sucking in souls
I think you should battalion
the borders with snow

The apocalyptic dread is all over me. Inside my head. Surely now, we will be attacked again. Though Phoenix is a long way from the East Coast, where all of the terrorist mayhem took place four years before, my paranoia is running unchecked. We devise escape plans in case of attack. When the lights go out, are if the sky turns to fire and we somehow survive, the best plan is to walk north to the mountains since the automobiles and highways supporting them will be of no use. We will move to the mountains north of Cave Creek and Carefree. I know where there are springs and water and game to be had as we worry ourselves into a survivalist mentality since, after all, we are sure to be attacked again and if, say, the Palo Verde Nuclear Power station were attacked the winds would head generally northeasterly and if we went southeasterly … oh hell, a few days later, weeks, then a month past, and nothing happens, my swirling brain gets calm enough to get toward a more practical plan. Because, you see, we felt the real problem was our inability to mix with people in such a hotbed of conservatism where no change is necessary, where the stores are chockfull of goods, most people are fully employed, where hundreds and hundreds of SUVs continue, shamelessly from their daily grinds to their convenience stores and big box meatlockered retail hubs and back to their TVs at night to feed on channelized fear and gory, glorified entertainments.
To escape the city to seek like-minded souls in the presumably more stable confines of small resort becomes … a kind of solution we can both get behind … so off to the small towns we go …

~

The Bull Run Fire came to about my doorstep. Five miles east, wind in my face and the fire plume, a violet volcano was close enough to see the white washed coat of burned juniper to force the Saturn in the nostrils. It was burning as a series of full plumes on Hackberry Mountain, south of the Verde River Valley in Central Arizona. But the mountain and the nearby mesas appeared to fizzle out and dampen around a many shouldered beast of fire and smoke.
We had been living in the Verde Valley for six months, on the edge of BLM lands holding a good portion of the General Crook Trail as it wound its way up to the Plateau. Then a major fire, started in Carefree maybe 60 to 80 miles south as the crow flies from the easterly banks of the Verde River, as it flowed to the desert canyons north of Phoenix. Big suckerfish Phoenix. We had escaped, but not for long. The fire started at some high-end hacianda had come all this way up and over and across the mountains, burning great fields of sage and juniper and sajuaro; the mountains of central Arizona blackened, from highway to shining highway,, burning more than 100,000 acres. As the smoke climbed onto the ridge, we went home and made a list of what we would need when the call for evacuation came, feeling a strange craving disaster to bring the memories awake, the dreaming down as great thin-legged clouds spiderwalk across the purple ridge, purple with weather, as our precious things shake in their cupboard, and nostalgia elucidates the decision making process.
Lightning pounds the mesas and the wind pushes down in atomic bundles and white orange flares of violence; A curtain on the sun is a dirty window of light, as we blow out compressed desires, pressing the sky, re-animating us.

From “Ginsberg Rolls Over,” the latest book by Douglas McDaniel






Colfax Avenue Daydreamer
After a One-Way Ticket, Yeah

The more the caffeine sugar jar
jumping in my head got to my
celebratory cortex cerebral,
the closer the pseudo God-man,
the Dark Knight found me on the corner
Hindu-fied, hypgnogothic
in a Tarot table of a place
with schizms of pagans
shuttering in their wastes
into plastic party hats
and flower throwing anarchists
looked at photos of the police
in the basement down below
I climbed a ladder, O Jungy Jacob,
found a mandala, stepped outside
of its snaky circle where every thing
was included, including myself,
that is, whoever, whatever ...
I calm in resident outbursts
like the middle finger sticking out
the jail cell door,
like the politics of unification
breaking old systems down
Of course! Of course! Of course!
A Gemini like Yeats would come up
with mysterious plans, a vision,
to keep his humanity from blowing apart ...
Just as sugar is stirred by a thin coffeehouse
straw, when all I needed really was a Guinness
in the Irish bar down the boulevard,
a geisha, and some noise ...
Find me a place to go, go, go ...
O angel of anxiety, get me away
from these, these, these ...
well adjusted brothers and sisters
safely bolted down by America's
college scrubbed lasses and guys,
trimmed in buzz cuts,
maintaining low maintenance
They just got a cell phone call
and I became unreal

II.

Passionate are the intensities
on Colfax Avenue,
long as a dynamite fuse
lit during the gold rush
Kerouwacky, not so much
romanticized as realized:
This age of wandering long
in the shadow city
And there have got to be
bus drivers, fully passive
aggressive, on the gas,
on the brakes ...
Shaking the Kundalini
right out of your backbone
Dark arts of mythic Batmen,
cops with cameras, old
Thana'tost around hippies
with beards as long as sad stories
Black women, Rosa Parksy,
quaking the whole busload
into fear with endless rants
about stomps upon her feet
Long and wicked from east to west,
this hard marbled street,
this historic incubus to commerce,
open desire, cell phone walls:
The distances between neighbors
In the summer it'll burn,
seems to me, recreating '68
where I almost cut
my hair

A Poolside Chat
with Winter Birds

Four pigeons
by the whirlpool
coodling up chlorine
Flying life, safe as ginger
in a cabinet,
extrapolates lifespan
The wingspan
of swimming pool pigeons
is dependent upon supply,
depth and demand
It is to the good fortune
of the young chicks
that their short necks,
soft beaks, cannot
reach down to drink
Six poisoned pigeons
find survival in the short-term
risk at the swimming pool lip
Later, they will plummet
to the floor of the concrete
corridor
Anonymous slaughterers
break off with the wind,
bleached and careening

Deconstruction of Arizona

Arizona, I don't recognize you anymore
Your creosote roots lie beneath
the perfect piles of McDonalds parking lots
Arizona, an unequal symmetry
of rubble piles collect
Ten thousand miles from here
Arizona, you are responsible ...
The middle-aged businessman
with expendable income
sweats for pleasure
Arizona, when can I stop sweating?
I swear in the heat like a pizza oven
Arizona, you are a car part store
but you got no glass to see through
and the beige collection
of air conditioned caves
is conditioned to respond
in all the right ways
The forests are in ashes
as the governor gapes
from a helicopter high
Arizona, I can find no fluid,
no friend, nor car phone to lean on
for company
By GPS, you can find me in the living room,
darkly lit, with rayolight flashing
bible black blurbs
Arizona, not even Ginsberg
would gripe about your tripe,
so blurred with anonymity
hell hardly matters anymore
Arizona, my life's belongings
are melting in a storage facility
and there are more things that beep
here than I can count
Arizona, you haven't hassled me for a while
The world is flooding
as you dry up and blow away
Arizona, a kid almost got crushed in your parking lot
and I went to one of your social service buildings
and was amazed about how many homeless lurks
were sleeping in the lobby
Arizona, I can't get assistance at the cash register
and the mountains are closed, cats run free
and all the lizards are gone
Arizona, you are sucking in souls
I think you should battalion
the borders with snow

From “Ginsberg Rolls Over,” the latest book by Douglas McDaniel






West Coast Storm Warning

The world’s end wind
is just a frantic curtain call
of polarizing sun, oceans
rising before the fall
The world’s end wind
is you, watching TV,
swearing me away
as if tea and Tiffany
were a mortal plug
I know I’m going mad
The world’s end wind
is shaking sense into the house
The world’s end wind
has blown me off the tracks
The world’s end wind
puts the cat in heat asleep
The world’s end wind
is you on a bucking final horse
breathing sweet acetyline

What Would Water Do?

The water would run to work,
but turn, gone amok at the work corner,
toward the One-O-One
to drink a red eye and puff a smoke
in the early morning Ra
The water would pick up
trash along the way
but wait for more force
to finish the job
The water would arrive
on time and unplanned,
feeling out each empty
bottomland space
since every handmade
space is disorganized
differently
The water would percolate
in the apocalyptic heat,
catch the wind
and go fly a kite
The water would commit
murderous rage and recede,
unpleased, unsatisfied,
moving on the moon

Thankful for the Tankfull

I thank the sky lord
for clean water to drink
Thanks
I thank Tom Clancy
for providing so much
damn PR for the military
industrial complex
Thanks
And a special thank you, too,
to the clown in his flight suit
sky bombing us in his dreams
And a special fuck you to
the apocalypse for being
such a damn Good Book
and making it so hard
to get clean water
in Beiruit
and for the passing
of fluids through
his oh so cool
heliopadster suit
And thanks for a hole of hot sun
stretching toward the East,
causing a bubble that burns
little words into a diplomatic urn,
and thank the world
for what the devil would do
His imitation is your mastery
as the nations fold and unfold
and the bailiwicks bawl
about the rule of law
And thank you money for your energy
passing over the world like a green cloud
being and for hell being all filled up,
by the counting of your digits
Thanks a lot for my sanctuary box
Thanks, thanks a lot
Gift thanks to this gift, this square
where I stand with my porridge
and my cash register or gun
Oh, so much thanks for this taste,
for melancholy and sleep
to keep me not so much
sane but at least in a state
of palatable paranoia
Thanks for allowing me
the rather obvious conceits
of always wanting more
and giving me a way
to step out of the circle, hey!

From “Ginsberg Rolls Over,” the latest book by Douglas McDaniel


The Secret Life
of Booksellers

I have no idea when I wrote the book,
That is, I don't remember. Sorry,
I was asleep behind the cash register
And genius, dense as cobalt
resides here, breaking the glass
shattering forgetfulness,
And I can no longer distinguish
The borders of commerce, art,
And yes, conceit
Masters of accident and intention,
the labored conceits of high words
timed for ill effect, for pens
warmed up in hell, for swords
thrust in God's eye, as the rivers
run thirsts for blood,
mocking heroes, making
heroes of mockery
During the program,
the light goes through
Numbers one, zero, zero,
zero, Oh ... One, again, One
I stay low beneath the sun
running a game in my head ...
Look short, lean on the high side
trust is a gap-toothed old friend
real or imagined as concrete blocks
on the walk roll on to forever
Cheese steak, Philadelphia,
never liked the place, though
I've never been there, but in the long drawn out
portal of impairment there are those I've met
who taught me not to like the place
They were no morning doves, blasphemers
or cowards or other kinds I can relate,
mostly just commercial power dogs
blind to trees, my tears, my river
of grotesque memories to which
I fill in my familiar streets
Manic miss, the mourning missy mists
as the sun comes out as I learn
everything I have believed
since I was a child was inexact,
not exactly wrong, but incomplete,
a pyramid of obscenities,
between the brick and eye
I cannot delete
The older you get, they say,
the less you know
Orange blossoms die
in the drying sun
One zero One, One zero One
But you can ignite your morning sock
with a drink of chlorine to ignite
adrenal glories, borderline stories
since the gory truth of the matter
is I need scatterbrain automobiles
of desire to burn up the road
in order to get out of my own way
Progress is personal that way
Hip quirks of commerce, commerce
of caffeine, piped-in music to drain
into the ears, the mouth, the throat ...
Benjamin Franklin is dead. Capitalism is
fascism outside the box of the electorate
and all that remains for the taking
is democracies dropping dull
as the thirst for beer, cigs, cokes,
loads of little pills, drowning out
any chance of waking
The other day a storm came
and left puddles in the parking lot
and then some guys came by
and washed the water away
Six hundred miles of the Colorado River
snakes it's way toward oblivion governed
by the rush toward clean dish harmony,
Washed cars, flushed toilets, fountains
Of pressurized glee
It rained that night and it was not enough
to feed the liberal arts retreat
I got robot leanings
I crave firm meanings
but I'm not a very good robot
and it gets me blue
though I've rediscovered my
A-dee-dee in your certainty,
your bricks and blocks,
your methods of narcotic
information, your great ideas
for getting lock-step
with the cityscape,
your clean machine
your hearts of vogue
disclosure, opening through
my donut hole of despair
This is not enough
Somehow, I don't end
up screaming out during
this naked lunch along
the narrow channel
you provide, narcissistic bastard
of bazillion rooms for an empty house,
A roomful of vacuous shelves
And now that Dan Brown has co-opted,
made corporate all disbelief,
the endless cosmic paradise of history
is elusive as the facts of nature
we no longer need to disprove
as the physical universe
shelves the metaphysical self,
and the shadow people squeeze
this lemon dry, leaving only
the seeds on the tarmac
for birds to eat up,
for birds who can only squawk for answers,
birds to serve up the shallow
surface of a simmering deep dark well
that appears to be nothing but
a cast of inbreeds gripping for power
Revolutionary monsters,
collectors of Hebrew letters
chained up by white knights
who scoured the Holy Lands
for relevant riches
for an ever-present dream
Yes, the world is replete with guitar stars
and assassins capable of spinning
schemes to make us feel better
Then comes clever wordplay,
then comes prosaic pop,
then comes the heightening
of the humdrum, of novelty
of pathetic little stories,
wrought Beatleesque
as we test the business end
of this busted bus, for young bucks
worth singing of
If my brain is a factory
churning up dread, then I wish
I had a camera for those
brief moments of ecstasy
when I am the real me
reverent, at Fenway
Stephen King is multiplying
nightmares by the boxcar
and conservative talk show hosts
roam free on the pricey shelves
of liberty
How do I not wake
in tremors of fear?
The boatman loads
a gunny sack
The boatman is prolific
in waves and waves
The hearse is an alliterative
anticipation of the worst
Shakespeare drums up three sermons
based on new product by Paul Simon
Garfy yodeled, icons deconstruct
Late in life, late in life
doling out snippets
for old yups
Great artifice
served up like
cold cuts
a generation so far
from their overrated riots
in the streets of the 1960s
they can barely crap over
the latest name-brand smash
Fortunately, Neil Young does
remember, a lonely man doesn't
need him around anyhow
and each time I enter your aisles
the need diminishes for the media mad
toggles for what used to be
known as chaos, but now
is regarded as proof
the liberals were wrong
I know too much
I'm a stone face,
an Edward R. Murrow
without winking …
Can't even drink rain,
quit drinking
The broadcast is leaking
City life is the poverty
of seeing the poor bleached
white boy on the magazine
stand, sinking
At night it's different,
the open desert
(now that's a funny one)
goes on notice as missing
Closed in, safe, hot burn
bags of bones
The bookstore is a parking lot
for words
And at night, body part theater
passes the time while my
little ark of verbs lie in wait
as a final sacrifice
for the final fire
I am cloud cutter,
a palace of clutter
sifting around for words
that, when I find them
die again, whitewashed,
on a parking lot for words
I am the sheet
that keeps us cool
your protected dark
is my sanctuary,
our secret life
I am the dim prize fighter,
clunked down dung, dumb in
memory as the asphalt gets
titled and I fall back
the hill to you
I have eyes that wear down
from wondering

Thoughts Written on a Canyon Map
During a Coffee, Bidi and Piece
of Some Kind of Prettily Made Bread
While Gazing at a Hummer-Covered Parking Lot
at a Gentrified Suburban Republican Bistro

I charted this course
with a red string
on a map of black chalk
The roads are many,
the final choice, new
I climb up the cafe canyon
walls to get a better view,
to see over the trees
and see my way to you
Having returned like Prometheus
to my city in pretty chains of light,
the rains have stopped like Porches
braking in the sun, which burns,
big and bright, drying this coffee stop
tabletop with its eviscerating truth
Gathering force, moving toward
the majestic and mysterious,
the merely merrily whimsical
snowcapped peaks of Ouray,
just a day away, as Latin horns
are piped through soccer moms
in sweatpants and motors purr
Is this city immune to war?
This cream of violence
rises to the top
For what they eat and taste
and buy and like,
they will not stop
Mechanized sweet, sweet soap,
the umbilical sword of the clean,
is the last potable hope
of water for the healing
and giving peace a hearing
And while the danceworld cult is searing,
I advance across an asphalt clearing:
In my heart, the key is just the start,
this language of escape
is now my art