On meeting Edward Abbey on the Road to Mythville

I made Navajo land before nightfall, and I was an hour or so past the dingy distress of Tuba City. My last paycheck for my magazine editor's job was still un-cashed in my pocket. I had cut some contributing editor deal with my boss, but had failed to inform him about my plan to conduct business at large from an unknown origin. Ragged, irresponsible, yes, but inefficient I was most certainly not. Chances were good my only funds, about $2,000, wouldn't be wasted at such reservation trading posts as Kayenta or Dinnehotso. It was well past time for any possible bank to be open. My credit cards were a joke and my ATM card was sucked up by the machine because I'd typed in the wrong personal code three times. Which meant I was some kind of imposter. I was flying under the radar of networked commerce, without the membership of any club or any privileges of any kind.

Thoughts about Katsinas also kept me company. Those Hopi deities, religio-mythic gods shaped by genetic memories we now successfully suppress, signal me as power line towers crisscrossing the plateau, part of a strange and sinister networking paradigm. They inspire abstract thoughts about winged super beings. Better known as Kachinas, they are now popularly now rendered as merely commercial dolls for trading posts and Western art galleries, but were once said to conjure thunder, rain and perpetual corn from their Zeus-like overview atop the San Francisco Peaks. The Peaks can be seen overlooking the holy land from hundreds of miles away. I had from childhood thought of these power-line towers as representing the same kind of magic. In some quixotically networked way, they were. With everything else nature provided, even these well-engineered affronts to the red rock esthetic kept the imagination running hot as it melted and coalesced, like lava, into the land.

Even as the headlights in darkness made the road a narrow pipe of light, even as the grand mesas turned my thoughts toward introspection, the Katsina towers' metallic silhouettes against purple shadow lands invited daydreams about twilit spooks and medicine men and shape changers. Creation tales about the "First People," passed by spoken word alone to the local children by elder who learned the same way, were also a part of my database of memes. Certainly, like the Hopi, who believed themselves to have emerged from other worlds, my worldview followed those same power lines, off toward the blank horizon, off into impossible lands of unlimited electrical energy.

We failed romantics are funny that way. When we are most disturbed, most out of control, our muses spin wonderful and sentimental cosmic tales. We are truly ionized. The possibilities for a world filled with magic and true love and finding a hobby in potted plants, properly watered, are endless. Even when, in fact, what we are really up against are big rigs passing at chaotic intervals, with wrong-lane "chicken" games with oncoming Pontiac sedans with dents in the side, with the brake lights of pickups rusted by acid rain.

Maybe you have been there? I hope not. But maybe you can relate. Have you ever looked into the oncoming "brights" with your sense of resistance dangerously passive. Did you hedge against the temptation for a head-on collision? If so, well then, you'd have recognized the blue-black ravens navigating over my head, invisible in the night, hoping for a sign of food. In the grand scheme of things, we are all little sweet warm morsels of hope for dark angels overhead, potential fresh road kill for a predatory power that apparently doesn't give a damn. And may be just as blind as we in the great void of things.
As I tried to wash away, sanitize and underarm-protect myself from the unfortunate fumes of another species' idea of promise, I watched Native American children play by the long-straight roadside while mom and dad and uncle and Bennie push a shiny new sport utility vehicle toward the distant Kayenta gas station and trading post. Transition life approaches the crossroads.

I remember, coming over the hill as I could barely make out the skyscraper silhouettes indicating the gateway to Monument Valley, a ghostly red gas light glow representing the ad-hoc gathering of civilization and it's vested interests at the crossroads of Kayenta. A mythic site, in my mind, even to this day. And it always will be. Kayenta is a place to eat transition time as a kind of fuel for dreams. Unfortunately, the services that such peak moments of insight provide will often leave us, well, a bit tiffed in the head.
After a few hundred miles of staring into produce truck high beams late at night, anyone's visual acuity will go askew. Hallucinations will thrive just past the limits of your imagination. Sayeth William Blake: Man's perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception; he perceives more than sense … can discover. When there's not enough coffee in the world to keep the eyes from dropping off, then for just a split second, anything is possible on a list ranging from accidental death to revelation to the all inclusive opening of some flood gate to the netherworld.

Sure, I saw something, felt something, or at least believed I felt something supernatural. It made the tiny hairs on my arms tingle and my brain flash with excess electrical impulses. Enough to send enough volts up the Katsina windmill towers of my mind. That was real enough. Soul fright? Perhaps.

I can't determine if it was real or imagined. I don't want to think about that just yet. Barely matters, at this point. What's more pertinent to the issues surrounding such synchronistic stuff----when archetypal aboriginal myths leap out at you, when poltergeists kick over household appliances, or your sudden personal Jesus appears in the lumpy folds of a tortilla----is how you react, retreat or impinge upon the formless, but quite material void, during the rest of your available time that follows.

What recollections I can safely trust about that night? Well, certainly there was my camping out plan, which suffered from what even Henry David Thoreau would describe as lacking in reasonable attention to detail: an overabundance of simplicity. I had a sleeping bag, a couple of blankets, and a vague idea that somewhere out on the Reservation there was at least one unlocked fence gate off the highway leading to a solitary patch of ground. Surely, there was some way to get some sleep without having to be too close to the dust-eating back-drafts of freighters passing by. But, on this night, sleeping at some rest area along road wasn't the problem. I could have slept in the middle of the highway almost to dawn out there in Monument Valley. I would have been quite comfortable to roll over, if just once, for a passing semi on the way to Blanding, Utah.

I just kept on driving. Nobody said I couldn't. And that was a nice, springtime fresh kinda' feeling about the whole thing. I was more concerned with how much hell a little late night monsoon could raise on my packing job in the bed of the truck. Yes, it was a fair mockery of my content management skills to see a large part of my tarp blown back, still attached, causing wind resistance and drag like a parachute packed during a fire. A couple of the bungee cords had loosened, too, and all of my worthy possessions, that is, those that I considered worth taking into indefinite space, were exposed for all of the antelope, mule deer and hustling truckers to see. A couple of boxes of books were exposed, and an old John Lennon biography had its cover ripped off by the wind. A tattered image of his granny glass spectacles were out there on Black Mesa, destined to fade in a short eternity of sunlight, wind, rain and microscopic red rock pinpricks of dust.

Meanwhile, back on the road to Mythville, top-volume Neil Young and Crazy Horse jammed on my truck radio with a demolition tune, "Tonight's the night. Tonight's the ni-i-i-ight."

~

I was taking each strange step in my life with the profound belief that I was walking with at least a little grace on my side. It required what you might call the art of being slow, being silent enough to feel the things around you. I was reading a lot of Eastern mysticism, so my general thought processes were tending toward the airy-fairy, otherworldly and overly mystical way of interpreting things----certainly an explanation for the way Coyote, another word that I had for her, had been canonized into "Changing Woman," or, in Apache tongue, "Eshe Na Glese."

Of the many reasons I was on the road that night toward Telluride, Colorado, my orgiastic seduction into her dysfunctional sphere was the most viscerally apparent. That is to say, I thought I was in love with a goddess. But really, I wouldn't have put so much gas in the tank if it wasn't for all of the things I'd ever learned from Native Americans that I had run across during the first 35 years of my life, or, even more to the point, to having a student-tutor (or better yet, idolizer-to-idol) relationship with Ed Abbey, the aforementioned writer of irascible environmentally-tinged essays and a couple of reasonably entertaining novels, including "Desert Solitaire" and "The Monkeywrench Gang," while I was attending the University of Arizona 15 years before.

The first time I met Ed Abbey, he monkeywrenched a perfectly good draft beer, a Heineken, by taking the light and dark versions and pouring the two bottles into one glass. In my view, one of the more unnecessary acts of eccentricity I'd ever seen him perform----and it's a long list. I had met him in Tucson, Arizona for an interview for the campus newspapers, The Arizona Daily Wildcat, where I was a reporter who preferred to ditch a class than miss a story. Abbey's included. We met at The Big A, an off-campus burger joint that he always used for interviews. A strange fact by itself, in many ways, since it was a sports bar and he thought football was a pox on the earth (but then, what wasn't a pox on the earth, as far as Abbey was concerned?). Yes, he'd done many, many interviews at The Big A, and I can't tell you how many times I cringed whenever the next reporter deigned to describe Abbey's iconoclastic persona with the following observation: Mixing light and dark drafts of Heinekens.

The second time I saw Abbey was on the first night of class at the University of Arizona in 1982. The creative writing department at the UofA had snagged the writer to teach his wannabe writer fans how to write non-fiction. He had been brought onboard by Richard Shelton, a version of the Luddite-in-the-Desert form who wrote poetry when, that is, he wasn't making bad decisions about who to bring on staff to teach creative writing. The fact was, Abbey wasn't a great teacher. An experience, maybe, but he and anybody else in the genre of sages in academia could have stayed home, for all they brought to the table. Save for Tom Miller, who I recall fondly but can't remember why: Every creative writing teacher I ever met was simply dodging the inescapable truth that the gig was just another way to put off their own writing projects. With far better income than most writers can usually expect. On that first night in Abbey's non-fiction class in the Language Arts Building, he taught me one of the only things I can remember about so many of such classes. Well, actually, three.

They are, as he wrote on the bulletin that first night after being about 10 minutes late: "1) Write right; 2) Write wrong; 3) Write on." Short and sweet, it was, and the same could be said for that first night ala Abbey. A few minutes later the grizzled, jeans-laded author was distracted, as we all were, buy something going on at the plaza. He rushed over to the second floor window of the classroom, and, after seeing a bunch of anti-nuke protesters go buy with candles, exclaimed, "Hey, I gotta go see that!" And with that, he rushed out the door and did not return. We wannabe monkeywrenching writers, sitting there in a our desks for just a short, stunned moment, had probably right at that point started to wonder if perhaps the lesson on how to write about cactus and coyotes might be included on a syllabus. However, there was no such mimeograph to follow, from what I recall. Welcome to Abbeyville.

We caught up with him at the candlelight vigil in from the old ROTC building at the center of the University. He was singing with the anti-nuke protesters. That was Abbey, the spontaneous one, holding a candle and I can still see the light flickering on his beard and in his eyes. He was performing, for us, for his students, for those who had not known he was the latest new campus celebrity. Certainly, no foe to publicity of any kind, Abbey well understood the necessity of being an outlandish personality. His greeting card was his frequent call at public gatherings to blow up the Glenn Canyon Dam. But that was just part of the performance.

I believe Abbey wanted to teach for reasons other than to be a teacher, or, to derive a nice, safe income after his upcoming book, "Good News," failed to become the monster hit that "Monkeywrench Gang" and "Desert Solitaire" had proved to be a few years before. Nope, it was other things. Including the desire for connectivity in a social, most certainly the beautiful young co-eds who attended his classes. More than anything else, it was this: At that point in time, perhaps one of the few times, he wanted to be where the action was. In fact, he wanted to be the action. For all intents and purposes in my life, he was the living symbol of boundless action, apologizing to no one, and, accepting it as part of the deal, the heavy price that might mean.

~

As a teacher, he wasn't so great, but I believed he took an interest in me, even when I tried to write like him. Once we were given an assignment to write something on the "Wild Side." Everybody else assumed that meant practice writing about cactus and coyotes and the call of the lone wolf student writer. Always one to color outside the lines, I decided to write about downtown Phoenix as viewed from a general walk around the Greyhound Bus station. In the course of my study of the terrain, I went by the Phoenix Convention Center, and discovered a couple that had snuck off into some bushes to make love. This, of course, was too good to be true, considering my idea for the article, and I turned it in as a metaphor about Eden and life in the city.

Nobody in the class believed that it happened, though. My classmates, during another one of those awful roundtable critiques (always to be taken with a grain of salt) told me it was non-fiction we were supposed to be writing, not fiction. But Edward Abbey believed me. He came to my defense, saying, "This is all just an exercise. All of this is."

~

There was, in fact, one item distributed at his second class in mimeographed form that proved to be a great boon. The Edward Abbey reading list: Barry Lopez, John McPhee, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. Two nature loving Luddites, a city slicker, and the patron saint of the New Journalism. But there was one other name, a strange one, that took me years to appreciate: Montaigne. The French writer was one of the first to try to express himself, via highly literary means, and it was he who came up with the term essayer, as in essay. It means, "to try."

~

The whole point of all of this, this …desire to break out into great wide open and quite dicey period of time and space was because, let's face it, I was intending to write about it. Sometimes, since my thoughts tend to wander, my notebooks were my only mental connection to meatspace. Other times, such as those examples when I'd scribble poems at a coffee house before I went to work, or, at a bar where I was usually playing the role of the eccentric loner in the back, the Watcher of Human Behavior, it appeared that kind of output was, in fact, a desperate sort of performance art. A lonely artist, a cry for help, a pen warmed up in a sad and self-perpetuating hell out of some desperate need to initiate something more interesting. It was the raw data on what had been seemed to be so unsatisfying about life in the suburbs of sunny Scottsdale----with my wife, and a fundamentalist mother-in-law, no less, both making it their regular routine to remind me that I was in every way, shape and form, a "heathen," often to the point of leaving written reminders beneath my pillow that I was a scum, shouldn't be writing about rock music for the local newspaper, or, that new book by Salman Rushdie, and that I would soon be going to hell if I didn't publicly hand myself over the JeeeeeSuuuuus. So yes, I know a few things about life in the microcosm of authoritarian rule.

My poetry was one of the few positive channels for anxiety and their release. That is, until my soon-to-be ex decided to set them alight in the backyard barbecue. I think I still have some charred portions of those hand-written early versions to this day.

I was keeping a notebook on all my journeys, and made a regular point of telling anyone in range of my intention to go from place to place, recording the experience that pretty much began with the breakup, or series of breakups, that ended my marriage. The first book of poems was called, "No Joy in Mythville," which started out with many decently written ditties that used baseball as a metaphor for life (many of which were later published), but then degenerating into terrible tales of screaming fits in the middle of the night and running like hell----my "McGiver" period, based on my rather tactical modes for keeping ahead of my angry ex-wife by keeping track of all available exits at any setting, public or private. Reading back on all that stuff now, I realize that I failed to maintain a proper notice of the fact that they charted increasingly large experiential loops of extreme incidence. Signs of a satellite spinning out of orbit.

And it all started out so innocently. The first page of the first of these poetic diaries, "No Joy in Mythville," still survives with the following opening entry: "Myth embodies the newest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words." It was a quote lifted from a book on the teachings of an Indian guru, which I'd bought for a quarter at a Goodwill store, just one day after I'd shown up at my brother's door in a working-class neighborhood in Phoenix, swearing I'd never return home for any more punishment again.
That last part proved to be untrue. And late night retreats to my brother's house, or, a city park at 3 a.m. if I'd decided that, perhaps, my wife's rages for the evening had cooled. Always a tough call. Like sticking your finger in a volcano to see if the lava was still hot. Usually, a good way to check was to look into her eyes for any signs of a glassy bulge----a technique that I would recommend to police on the lookout for murder suspects in large crowds.

Sure, I survived all that. But then, it's hard to say what kind of unhinging took place immediately thereafter. I'm assuming, at this point, that personal command and control issues will continue to be, for myself, an extreme hotspot.


~


I remember the excitement, in those days, of being on the verge of something, and it didn't hurt that my psychiatrist right after the split had prescribed a soothing drug to keep me from going too far off "post-traumatic-stress disorder" meter. But I must admit, with that little pill, taken every night just before bed, was enlisted a security, a sense of assurance. I was tapping into some circuits I'd never known before, and it sure helped me to sleep on nights like the one under a starless sky that October in Monument Valley.

So I popped a pill, took a slug out of water out my Boda bag, and stretched out my sleeping quarters just beneath the front fender of my truck, thinking that if cats can draw warmth from the engine, who am I to argue? I looked up at the no-sky, thinking what it must look like out there when the stars were bright and there wasn't a fast food sign for two-hundred square smiles. All that night out there. The blackness. I stared. And blinked. Then stared some more. I don't know: It could have been an hour, maybe two, maybe no time had passed at all. I was there, looking away from the truck, and I noticed a shadow being created by my vehicle.

Had I gone to sleep? Was I seeing things? Maybe it was the drug and my imagination fired by the colorful dreams of so much change? Maybe it was my desire to find something otherworldly, saturnine, so that I could once again believe, that I had as a child, that I was destined for prophecy.

Maybe I wanted to recall the massiveness from within that I'd felt during nightmares when I was six years old: What was the dream? The universe in conflict with the point of a pin? I remember the boyhood contentment in the belief that I was either secretly retarded, or, gifted in ways my parents would never completely understand (later someone would say I suffered from some kind of "attention deficit" at an early age, that it was a miracle I'd learned to read and all, and that I was a lucky boy, since I'd formed what they called a "compensation."

Maybe I was wired differently. Or, I had just watched too much sci-fi television during the 1960s. One of my earliest memories was when my father allowed me to sit up----during one of those desert nights in a tract home in Phoenix----to watch The Man on the Moon. How fascinating, the possibilities that a child could conjure in those years. I could never miss the next week's episode conclusion, a teaser for the next week, for Lost In Space. Danger! Danger! Robot's arms waving...There were others. The Aliens, Star Trek, a show my father would watch until my mother would force him to turn it off, the ridiculous drek! There was the day we landed on the moon, my half-deaf grandfather trying to pick up the Houston Astros game on the radio in South Texas. But mostly, it was the dreams.

How shall I remember them now? They were more sensations than visions. It was as if infinity were creeping through me, and the mind, overwhelmed, were spinning in a kind of motion sickness. The universe. The head of a pin. That's what stays with me now. The precision of a point, a perfection. Then infinity, or, that is, a universe that is slowing from the entropy of the Big Bang. Who knows the layers of fact or fiction that the mind can place on the memories of dreams of early childhood. I know that the universe, the concept of infinity, of limitless distance, fascinated me as I played with my NASA action figures, with my G.I. Joes. I had a solitary mind: I could spend hours with myself in the back yard, dreaming some post-Disney fantasy in a time when anything that could be imagined could be conjured up on a screen? How could I keep still in class? How could I be happy in a marriage that kept me in chains, a dictatorial regime that led to her throwing more than one book of poems to the barbecue pit, and many, many roads to life never taken?

And the road to this particular road?

How far would I go for love?

And what, exactly, was that a light coming from the top of the hill off in the distance?

The road headed off in that direction, but the light was sitting still, a single beacon. I sat up, wondering if that had been there all night and I was just noticing it now. It could have been a motorcycle up there, at three in the morning, some guy having a smoke or taking a piss before speeding off to his leather-clad compatriots in Moab. But I kept looking at it, and, once awake and shivering in the cold of a damp Autumn night, decided it was best to pack up as quickly as possible and keep heading toward the Rockies, where I ultimately wanted to make my new home.

I tried to roll up my sleeping bag the best that I could, folding under the tarp, as opposed to tightening the bungee cords to secure it in the wind. I threw myself into the truck, gunned the engine, turned on the heater to full blast. I put my jacket, lit up a smoke. Checking the light again, I noticed that it was gone, or maybe in moving it had become obscured from my view. Checking the road behind me, I hit on the gas and was off toward Blanding, just about to cross the border into Utah. The sun wouldn't be up for a few more hours, and it was nothing but my headlights on the road, once again.

I grabbed a cassette tape from the floorboards and it turned out to be a spooky old tune from a hippie mountain band, Major Lingo, from Jerome, Arizona, a ghost town on the side of a mountain that overlooks the red-rock cathedrals of Sedona. They played electronic pedal steel guitar with menacing little arabesques. It gave the road a manic mood, and as I think about it now, an odd sense of premonition or synchronicity.

There was something in the way everything shifted around me.

Did I come come into the presence of the Kachina's son right there?

Should I convince myself, swear by the sudden drop in temperature in the flat-bed truck, the shadow passing through the back window, an intuitive kick of fear and the fall, like a cemetery stone chip, of a cassette tape to the floor?

It happened where the plains became flat and the sunrise, hidden in clouds and cold wind, had not yet risen over the curvature of the canyons. I felt a presence as I drove under a coal escalator leading over the road, and I thought I saw a wolf in the rearview mirror.

~ From "23 Roads to Mythville," by Douglas McDaniel

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.