No Signal Cafe


I'm disconnected from the internet. My Priority Chip has shut down and I'm staring into the dark drive, which is to say, back into my own mind. When I'm connected I'm like Bergamo staring into the glass that leads vision out into the world, and simultaneously reflects back into the unconscious, which, being the discarded and unknown, is (for a man) female.

Ursula the clone is my impression of a woman, but she's nothing but a parody of a female. That's about all men can do, is a parody. The feminine doesn't use words but contains them, like she contains everything else. Words might thrust into her sentient emptiness with wit and wisdom or with threats and guile, but all she feels is a whispering in her ear. A very wise woman explained to me that women need to take things inside and experience them in the body before speaking. "Sounds good to me. We can talk later." That's why feminine women are seldom fast talkers.

Some men are fast talkers, and some are slow talkers. I could be a fast talker if I didn't have an equal admiration for a slow talker, chewing on a stem of grass and squinting toward the horizon for a signal from the heavens. A fast talker moves from thought to thought like a monkey swinging through the trees. To get a rhythm he, or she, has to create one deliberately, a patter and flow, a hustle and flow, an Eddy and a Flo ...

But in the best of circumstances, the thought to thought tempo picks up neurosis rather quickly.

Slow talkers are attuned to the rhythms of nature, like trees and animals. They have a serpentine sensuality about them sometimes.

In between earth and sky there is the cardiac rhythm; the heart is at the center, providing the tempo. Brugh Joy is fond of saying that the advanced, advanced spiritual work is heart centering.

To be running at the speed of thought is to require centering outside the body, in an ideology, a party, a belief system, a group identity. Obviously it takes time to reflect off something separate from your own body, which means that you can't escape time while doing it. "Death needs time for what it kills to grow in."

... pause ...

This morning I left the house and there were three painters working on the exterior. We exchanged perfunctory remarks on the weather, which is very warm for the time of year. "It's starting to worry me a little," I said. "I'm afraid we won't get any snow in the peaks." I've been thinking about a highway job up at Big Lake, which ought to be snowed in by now, but the job's progressing like it's September instead of November. It's at over 9,000 feet, whereas we're a mile high. Another job at the Grand Canyon is proceeding like it's summertime.

"Global warming," one younger painter said, with a slight note of disdain. "I love it."

I realized that I was entering a political confrontation and said nothing else.

The snow on the mountains stores water and releases it gradually into the streams and rivers, and when the seasons aren't there we're in for some very severe weather patterns as sudden cold fronts hit warm air. The truth is that nobody really knows how bad it's going go be or how fast it's coming, but what is for certain is that we aren't going to like it if our atmosphere becomes like that of Mars.

"Today's forecast, just more solar wind; all the water left through the wounds in the atmosphere. But keeping with our network policy of accentuating the positive, that means another sunny day with no rain in the forecast ..."

When I hear somebody saying how much they like global warming, it sounds to me like a rat saying how much he likes peanut butter. I have determined that these people are probably disconnected from their bodies, and thus from the earth, which is why they're often excited about being snatched up to heaven when they've wrecked it completely. It's the Euripides school of plot resolution.

On the other hand, today really is a beautiful day in a beautiful town, so I don't have to play the grouch without a counterbalance of good humor. I drove down to Cuppers and drank espresso while I wrote. I use the past tense because I'm back home and connected to the internet again, which is why the links are in. I'm in the process of editing now. Obviously these realities are separated in time and space, but now occupy the same point.

But ... back to Cuppers ... today there was a problem with the internet signal. I didn't mind, really. Sometimes it's fun to write without access to information not stored on site.

I've been to espresso cafes in Europe and San Francisco (a suburb of Europe, which is why wingnuts hate it so much), and I can say from experience that Cuppers is a world class coffeehouse. When I pulled up I saw a young man there Linda and I shared a table with on Saturday night, at The Raven. This morning he was at an outside table, taking in the sun.

The Raven is another place in Prescott that's as good as it gets, in my opinion. We drank local wine, from Page Springs, and listened to Shri, an amazing blues band.

There wasn't anywhere to sit so I asked Matt if we could join him. He said one chair was reserved for his manager, but that we could have the other two. We shared our wine with him and found that he is a finger style guitarist. During the evening several other young people were around the table. When we were driving home Linda said, "When I meet young people like that I feel so much more hope for the future."

I agree with her. They are terrific people, focused, socially conscious, and aware of the environmental challenges they face as we die and bequeath them our garbage. They are leading a cultural revolution here, and I love it.

There are a lot of people in Prescott who complain bitterly about the influx of Californians, but having gone away and come back, I say it's a change for the better. One day the dogcatcher -- a Sheriff's deputy -- gave me a warning ticket and a lecture about having my dog off leash. He even made some pointed comments about the people who come in from the outside. I had to give him a driver's license and it was California. I was living in this town before he knew how to control his piss, and the situation was just the same back then. There were people who were bitter about the Prescott College students coming in, and who were scared of what changes outsiders might bring.

Change is a constant here, and so is fear of change.

I used to accommodate myself to these people, because if you live where most everyone describes being mean to people different from you as conservative, you don't disagree with them from instinct, the same as you don't pick up a rattlesnake. I was talking to a neighbor who came here from Massachusetts and he said he's very wary of saying anything about politics to anybody. I've heard a grown woman at the local dog park say she sold her property in New York because she hates Hillary Clinton so much. I don't blame her. If her shadow is projected onto that woman she must see a reflection that does indeed make her want to throw a hissy fit.

I think this is less important to me than to a lot of people because I have mostly been a loner. From the time I was little I was moved around from one culture to another. I moved from being a Tennessee hillbilly to the Mexican border to a prison town to an all Mormon town to a desert highway town to San Diego to San Francisco to Tokyo ... etc. ... After awhile I realized I was collecting the differences, instead of defending against them. There are local realities and there are non-local realities.

In this beautiful place there are mostly Bush Cheney bumper stickers. I've had one guy, at the dog park, tell me volcanos have more effect on the climate than carbon emissions. I didn't say anything before I researched it and discovered it isn't true, at least not without collapsing geological history to make the math work. I showed him the evidence that he was mistaken, and what did he say? He said, "I hate Al Gore."

That's his position on the destruction of the planet by uncontrolled pollution. He isn't unusual here, and to tell the truth, I like the old guy and have made a special effort to be nice to him, once I recognized that with him it isn't information that afflicts him, but bitterness toward people he doesn't understand and thus doesn't like. I'm reminded of Burroughs description of the American businessman looking into the mirror as he shaves, thinking, "Other people are different from me and I don't like them very much."

The climate report on global warming from the U.N. stressed that we have to start now and have drastic action to avert a catastrophe. We have no idea if the planet can even survive what we've done to it already. Out in the ocean there's an island of garbage twice the size of Texas, and there are dead places in the seas where nothing much can live. And how is this faced by the die hards? "I hate Al Gore."

It is changing, though. The last good wine store in Prescott was in the St. Michael's Hotel basement, and it went broke. Now there's another one, off Willow Lake Road. It's the Royal Hawaiian Coffee and Wine Company, with the coffee shop next door to the wine shop. Before hitting The Raven for a night of the best blues this side of Chicago, we went over there for a tasting, then to Murphy's for the best Irish coffee in Prescott.

You might think I woke up Sunday morning with no way to hold my head that didn't hurt. No way. I was fine. I know how to pace myself, and we didn't go without food. There were hors d'oeuvres at the wine tasting and we ordered flatbread pizza with the wine.

I have now arrived at a completely arbitrary ending ... like Bill Murray at the end of Broken Flowers ... in the middle of a street that begins to spin around and around ... or maybe like a self-absorbed conversation drifting off into an awkward silence ...

Okay, maybe I was drunk, but I didn't have a hangover. And that is a testament to the quality of the wine we're producing in northern Arizona now.

Yassas!

Posted: Mon - November 19, 2007 at 10:22 AM