I understand that for President Obama’s climate change policy, natural gas seems to be a political necessity—a transitional energy source. However, here’s my question: Isn’t drinkable water a basic necessity for human life? How long can a human being live without water? On the other hand, is natural gas a basic necessity for human life? First things first. Water that we drink is returned to the circulatory water system of the earth. Natural gas that we extract is burned as quickly as we can pull it out of the ground, and it’s gone forever. Meanwhile, it has been widely discussed in recent years that clean water is the next great shortage that humans will face. Corporations are busily but quietly buying up sources of clean water. Whereas, the hot way of extracting natural gas right now is hydraulic fracturing, which pollutes drinking water by the millions of gallons per well, leaving it contaminated with such long-lasting pollutants as plutonium, among others. Anybody know the half-life of plutonium off the top of your head? A long time, right? Some of that polluted water gets injected back deep into the earth, where it’s somehow supposed to lie dormant and safe, so that it won’t contaminate our groundwater. Let’s see. Water is the universal solvent. It bonds so easily with other molecules, due to its high polarity, that it pulls other substances apart. The Grand Canyon was created primarily by the force of water. The Taoists characterize water as the strongest force in nature. Stronger than mountains. Certainly stronger than the rock pockets in the earth where we inject it after we’ve polluted it. Witness: “Over the past several decades, U.S. industries have injected more than 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquid deep into the earth, using...
When Muslin Extremists Spread Like Wildflower [Hippie Squared]
posted by Jeff Rogers
Here’s a word game we can play: Find all the dogberryisms in the next sentence. A terrible riff came between them, but luckily they nipped it in the butt before it became a mute point when they got caught in a worldwind and muslin extremists began to spread like wildflower. What’s a dogberryism? Same as a malapropism. And what’s a malapropism? We all know the phenomenon, whether or not we know the terms. It’s when someone uses a word in a sentence that isn’t the right word but it sounds like the right word. For instance: “Texas has a lot of electrical votes.” That’s from Yogi Berra, a well-known practitioner of the dogberryism/malapropism, swapping in “electrical” for “electoral.” I love these things. I like to collect them. Most overheard. A few I’ve made up myself. It’s infectious. If you have any good ones, drop them off in the comments—here at Fierce and Nerdy or on the Facebook post. I first learned the term malapropism from John Lennon, of all people. He used it in the classic “Lennon Remembers” interviews in Rolling Stone in 1970, to describe Ringo’s quirky phrases which Lennon used to inspire songs such as “Hard Day’s Night” and “Eight Days a Week.” Not sure those are malapropisms, exactly, but they’re clever. I only learned the term dogberryism the other day from Wikipedia’s malapropism definition. It’s from Shakespeare, via Officer Dogberry from Much Ado About Nothing (I can’t wait for Joss Whedon’s new movie version!), apparently another champion purveyor of the form. A few of the six dogberryisms in our sentence above are my very favorite kind: where the wrong word can actually function to express basically the same idea as the correct word. I think this kind of malapropism/dogberryism is actually worthy of a whole new term of its own. That can be our second word game. But first let me spin out a few of our examples. “Mute point” for me is textbook. I don’t know about you, but I hear “mute point” used more often these days than the correct expression “moot point.” I would bet this is because the word mute is better known today than the word moot. So I think this could actually end up changing the language over time, if the incorrect expression overtakes the correct one through more frequent usage. How would that work? Well, what do we mean when we say, “It’s a moot point?” We mean that the real point has already been made. The moot point is irrelevant, unnecessary. Beside the point. And what would a mute point be? Technically, a point that is speechless. It doesn’t speak to the issue at hand. Therefore it’s off target, unnecessary. Beside the point. Yes, the two meanings are a little bit different. But close enough for horseshoes. Close enough to consummate an act of communication; and maybe for “mute point” to creep in on “moot point” and plunder its linguistic portfolio. So now let’s play our second word game: Anyone want to try to come up with a term for this invasive-species kind of dogberryism/malapropism? I’ll try my hand at it, but please take your own shot in the comments if you wish. Fogberryism, perhaps? Because it can serve to gently fog our minds? Benepropism? Because its effect is more benevolent, less malevolent, than a malapropism, by virtue of conducting the proper idea more or less intact from mind to mind, despite the hiccup of the technically incorrect word usage—thus being an effective act of communication? A pure malapropism is not just the wrong word, but the wrong thought entirely. An electrical vote can’t substitute for the meaning of electoral vote. It’s clearly different. A mute point, on the other hand… I’d say there are maybe three more of these fogberryism/benepropisms in our example sentence above (way above now): “spread like wildflower,” “worldwind” and my personal favorite “nipped...
Silly Smorgasbord & Rough Draft Riffs [Hippie Squared]
posted by Jeff Rogers
My mom used to do a thing she called “Silly Smorgasbord.” She’d raid the refrigerator for leftovers and the cabinets for quick items she could skid out onto the table to cobble up a dinner for my stepbrothers and me. That might sound like a lesser meal plan, but I always loved silly smorgasbord. I loved the name. And I loved the assortment of tastes and surprises. Some of my favorite dinners were silly smorgasbord. So for this installment of Hippie Squared I raided the pages of my journal and plated some recent rough draft riffs on a smorgasbord of topics. By way of preparation, I marinated a couple in their own juices, then set them to simmer at a slow rolling boil. (Say that three times fast.) I set one on the windowsill to cool. I trimmed the crust off one. Added a dash of hot sauce here, a sprinkle of cheese over there. Had fun makin’ it. Hope you enjoy it. Let’s riff on gay marriage for a minute: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” and on into the inalienable rights part—that’s basically the Mission Statement for our country. It’s not in the Constitution. It’s from the Declaration of Independence. Which means there’s debate about whether it even carries the force of law. But it carries a heaping freight of moral force, doesn’t it? And in a way it’s a challenge issued to history by Tom Jefferson, John Adams and Ben Franklin—the committee who wrote it—and all the other guys who signed it—that has resounded down the decades and around the world and back. All the ways we’ve fallen short of that challenge. All the ways those men fell short of that challenge—most of them...
Reading: A Seductive Magic [Hippie Squared]
posted by Jeff Rogers
I love to read. Love love love love love it. I find it to be an incredibly intimate way to share someone else’s thought(s). They wrote it down. They signed it. They hit enter, they hit send. There’s no backing off of that. “This is what happened to me,” they are saying; or, “This is what I imagined into being. This is what I think. This is what I feel.” What a brave and abandoned thing for them to do. What a gift for them to offer. To me, it’s a profound, a mystical, an intimate and vulnerable transaction. I could, but I won’t, say sacred. On my end of the transference, as reader, I become custodian of the thought. Behind the screen of the page (or the literal computer screen). There’s a safety, for the writer, and for me, of that page or that screen coming between us. Both writer and reader stand in naked intimacy, revealed in the light of what’s been shared, but wearing the masks that make it safe. We are hidden each from the other, by the mask of the byline; my anonymity to the writer; the face of the writer’s persona turned toward me. “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth,” as Oscar Wilde said, wearing his Oscar Wilde mask. Which can all make it sound deadly serious. But to me, it’s just a shitload of fun. I love to imagine. I love to think. I love to feel. When I read, it’s like I get extra shots at these things, more than I’ve earned through my own life’s experiences. I love to let my mind and spirit loose, wandering someone else’s journeys,...
The Séance: A Ghost Story? [Hippie Squared]
posted by Jeff Rogers
The only dead person we knew between the two of us was Valerie’s Uncle Robert. So we decided that for our first séance we would call on him. Valerie was my best friend in the neighborhood. She was eleven, and I was ten, in Lansing, Michigan in the fall of 1973. First we chose the room, and made it ready. We decided on my mom’s den, a small square room at the front of the house. A confined space, easy to scan for any ghostly activity we might summon. And if we managed to conjure any full-fledged ghosts, they’d have nowhere to hide. No nooks or crannies to crawl into. Plus, the room had only two outside light sources: one big window overlooking the front porch, and one small square window up in a corner. Both windows had roller shades, which thoroughly blocked the light — the old-fashioned kind, where you pulled a cord to unroll the shade, until it caught and stayed in place. To open the shade, you gave the cord another gentle tug and it rolled up again, letting the light back in. We closed the door to the room, and turned off the light switch. We squared up about ten feet in front of my mom’s bookshelves. They were packed with books: the latest literary bestsellers, sure, but also an extensive women’s lib section; a couple of yoga books; and several shelves of books on UFOs and ESP — including multiple titles by and about the trance-mystic Edgar Cayce, the so-called “Sleeping Prophet.” But also books about the supernatural: ghosts and hauntings. I don’t remember where we learned how to conduct a séance, but it was probably from one of my mom’s books. And how cool was that for a ten...
When I Made Dick Van Dyke Laugh (A Hollywood Valentine) [Hippie Squared][Best of FaN]...
posted by Jeff Rogers
I like this tale. What’s more, I like this telling of it. Hippie Squared is often mined from my personal oral tradition–oft-told tales of my adventures. But sometimes I get the nagging feeling that I told it better years ago at a party somewhere. Not here. This time, I feel like I finally nailed it. The first thing I can ever remember specifically laughing at was Dick Van Dyke’s slapstick tumble over a footstool, when he walks in the front door in the immortal credit sequence from The Dick Van Dyke Show. Certainly it’s the first wellspring of laughter from which I knew I could draw a fresh laugh every time. (And isn’t that much of what we love about TV–those reliable comforts?) Van Dyke’s a dancer. Even when not doing slapstick, his comedy was physical. He put his whole lanky rangy body into everything, his long rubber band limbs and his long expressive face animating every line he spoke, every reaction off someone else’s line. His slapstick itself was a kind of physical comic poetry. A living limerick. My friend Fritz and I used to imitate that footstool tumble over and over with the stool in my basement family room. So it’s also no doubt the first bit I ever practiced in a conscious effort, as a routine, to elicit laughs from others. That’s why it meant so much for me to make him laugh. Which is not to advertise any great display of wit forthcoming on my part. I got the feeling that Dick Van Dyke laughs easily. He likes to laugh, he likes to make people laugh. He’s generous with his laughter. A man in the right line of work, you might say. Anyway, one sunny afternoon in the mid-eighties when I...
Accepting Thirst: Edward Field’s Kabuli Days [Hippie Squared] [BOOK WEEK]...
posted by Jeff Rogers
A travel journal is a kind of quest tale. In 1970 poet Edward Field journeyed to Afghanistan questing for Sufis (as a Gurdjieff fan); “sex, as all travelers are;” and “a little hotel clinging to a rock in the middle of a rushing river” which he saw in a National Geographic in his dentist’s waiting room. And while a tourist goes looking for sights and souvenirs, a lone traveler with a notebook is seeking transformation. Kabuli Days: Travels in Old Afghanistan is the journal of his inner and outer travels, published forty years later but still relevant. Afghanistan is ever with us. 1970 was only three years before Afghanistan’s king was deposed and the Russians invaded, before the mujahedeen and the Taliban and the decades of wars that still continue. Field’s an accomplished poet (After the Fall: Poems Old and New, 2007, among many others) and memoirist (The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag, 2006, on Greenwich Village bohemia), known for a direct poetic voice, “the simple language of truth.” Born in 1924, he became a poet in World War II. He was in his mid-forties when he wrote these pages. A travel journal takes its shape not from authorial design, like a novel, but the inescapable rhythms and patterns of a life, wrapped around the spine of a journey. Still, from Mashad, Iran, across the border to Kabul by bus, the first leg of his trip sets up scenes and themes that will recur again and again. Crowded bus rides on painful benches over rough roads past ruins, children squeezed in anywhere, with passengers from all over the world, Swiss and Pakistanis, English and Australians and French, until the bus breaks down in the desert. Field has a poet’s close eye for people...
Three Line Lunchbox [Hippie Squared]
posted by Jeff Rogers
So here it is: an assortment of items out of a Three Line Lunchbox. An apple, some chips and a few three line poems–spread ’em out on your picnic blanket. Ripe, stale, juicy or crunchy; gnaw on a couple and you decide. Enjoy with wine, beer or a glass of cool lemonade. Wild Grass I long to push This thin voice like wild grass Through that crack in the wall Late Night Groovers on the Dance Floor When you got it and you know it Man, you know You got it Wrapped in a Myelin Tortilla This freeway with its miles I’ve driven so often and so long Is surely wrapped in a myelin tortilla Along well-traveled intra-skull head highways Praise Ringo, True Drummer Lives in the moment Drums in the moment Lives in the drums Lament of the True Drummer Lord give me a band. Lord bring me songwriters. Lord send me a song to anchor. Lord lend me a beat to find And keep. Lord let my heart take its skipping, thunderous pulse. Bring it Back Around (Motto of the True Drummer) When in doubt, Bring it back Around. If you liked this post, please do us the further boon of Liking the Fierce and Nerdy page on FaceBook. Also, we’re giving great stream on Twitter, so do give us follow. featured image credit:...
Hearing My Voice Break [Hippie Squared]
posted by Jeff Rogers
When we write we are speaking, in print, in the voice of whatever we are. I find myself in a weird place right now. As I enter my fiftieth year, having come through two years of chaos and crisis in more than one arena of my life, I feel so changed that I’m not even quite sure that I know the sound of my own voice anymore. I feel the tectonic plates of my internal landscape have shifted so drastically that I’m on the other side of a faultline from the old “Hippie Squared,” and now, when I open my mouth to speak (when I hold my fingers poised above the keyboard), what comes out sounds like a squawk to me, a croak, a squeak. I hear my voice breaking. At forty-nine years old, you no longer expect to hear your voice break. Almost half a century old, and I feel like I’m speaking with a fledgling’s voice. I have to try out my old wings as if they’re new. They creak and moan with arthritis, yet it feels like I’m just learning how to unfold them and fly. I’m not even sure they’re not vestigial. I’m no longer even sure that flight is possible. But I feel forced to try. So yes, I’ve been through some hard stuff. I’m hardly alone in this, of course. The rough times are widespread. In my case: Grief. Layoff. Unemployment. Fighting to hold onto our house. Family health problems. The toll that all of these can take on our most intimate relationships. Hurting my loved one, terribly. Getting hurt. So who am I now–entering my 50th year, seemingly on the other side of the worst of it? On the earlier side of that faultline was a young...
You, Not You [Hippie Squared]
posted by Jeff Rogers
Flannery O’Connor once said that the only way to write successful autobiographical fiction is if you are able to look at yourself as a fictional character. In other words, if you can look at you as if you were not you. Autobiographical or not, your fictional characters are not you. They’re never you. Of course, they’re also all you. They’re never not you. They come from your head. Yet, if you want them to be real, you’ve got to give them their own head. Because they do come from you, they have their own integrity. An integrity that is of you. And sometimes, they know better than you. They know their little piece of you far better than you do. For instance, have you noticed that when you dream of someone you know, they talk like themselves and not like you? They say things only they would say, things that you would never think to say–if you were awake and tried to write their dialogue. Yet you did think to say those things. You did write that dialogue. With your dreaming brain. And you didn’t plan it. It was pure, real-time improv, made up on the fly. Genius improv. Buddha’s own improv. Some piece of you knows those characters in your life better than you know you do. I think about that sometimes when I’m writing fictional characters. How do I access that Buddha-genius dreaming brain when I’m awake and writing? With my fingers on the fly, writing dialogue for that integral little piece of me that I’ve set loose to try and run circles around the waking, dull, unimaginative and prosaic me that I am all too often. Me, not me. ...
All That California Female Energy (Another Turn on the Pony) [Hippie Squared]...
posted by Jeff Rogers
It was our first rehearsal for Salome, late spring 1991. I had managed to drag Mutahar Williams along. “Mutahah,” as it was pronounced, was his Subud name, but he was very English, his voice deep and resonant, like seasoned wood: an exquisitely-tuned instrument for poetry. We’d hit the coffeehouse poetry circuit trolling for players for Festival Dionysus, our anarchic take on the ancient Greek festival of wine and theater. I found Mutahar at Lizards on Santa Monica, or the Espresso Bar in the alley off S. Raymond in Pasadena. He was a professor at Occidental College and a considerable poet. The M in MTV still stood for music then, they actually showed videos still. Mutahar felt the time was ripe for poetry videos, so he made his own. Nature poetry, shot outdoors. I think I still have the VHS cassette somewhere. But I recruited him for the Ancients Chorus in Dionysus. He was one of those who remained skeptical of the show all the way through our run. Not as skeptical as the only professional actress in our patchwork company of poets, musicians, painters and general gung-ho creative types, who kept moaning, “This is going to ruin my career,” throughout every rehearsal. She never invited anyone she knew to the show. And she’d lose herself in back whenever the whole Gray Pony Chorus took the stage. Oscar Wilde’s Salome was our follow-up to Dionysus, and it would prove to be a fluke hit (as I wrote about last month, complete with cast and crew list, synopsis, etc.), but at that first rehearsal who could know? There were at least eight women there, and only three men: Mutahar, myself, and Blaine Steele, the director. (Peditto might have been there, too–our producer, and founder of the...
Gray Pony’s Wild Ride [Hippie Squared]
posted by Jeff Rogers
We did Oscar Wilde’s Salome in our underwear in the summer of 1991 and got “Pick of the Week” in the LA Weekly for it, a big deal then. We had a hit play on our hands. We were the Gray Pony Chorus. It was a wild ride. That was the peak of our renown. Since then, we’ve vanished from the historical record. Our most illustrious alumni have dropped us from their resumes. Google us and you won’t find a single reference– other than this one, after today. (Mark Ruffalo co-directed a show we produced, but you wouldn’t know it from IMDB.) One who does remember us is Robert Prior, impresario of the acclaimed Fabulous Monsters theater troupe. I say this not to brag, but in wonder: he’s often told me our Salome was one of his favorite nights ever spent in the theater. If I didn’t already love him, I would love him for that alone. So when Robert directed a new production of Salome this summer, exactly twenty years after ours, I rounded up a reunion of our cast and crew to go see it. It seemed to mean a lot to Robert and his cast that we came. And that meant a lot to me. I have enormous affection for those old performing days. Before we did theater in our underwear, we were a fully-clothed poetry performance group. We scored poetry for multiple voices, and backed ourselves on wind and rhythm instruments, on stages and in coffeehouses– places like Onyx Sequel in Los Feliz (on the site of the present Cafe Figaro); Jabberjaw on Pico; and Highland Grounds in Hollywood, 1989 and 1990. Gray Pony’s Godfather, C. Natale Peditto, founded the group for his Master’s studying oral traditions at Cal State Northridge. The first...
Lessons of the Taoist Demon-Wrestler [Hippie Squared]
posted by Jeff Rogers
This is a special Three Line Lunch crossover edition of Hippie Squared. It’s a first edition. Save this, it could be a collector’s item. (Do I date myself? Very well then, I date myself! I am large, I contain decades.) TLL graciously offered to step in when it became clear that HS was going to miss deadline. What else are blogmates for? three line lunch: a fitful and unpredictable diary in three-line poems by Jeff Rogers Lessons of the Taoist Demon-Wrestler Sometimes the only way to wrestle a demon and winIs to tap out And leave the mat. featured image credit: cazucito If you liked this post, please do us the further boon of Liking the Fierce and Nerdy page on FaceBook. Also, we’re giving great stream on Twitter, so do give us...
Actually a River [Hippie Squared]
posted by Jeff Rogers
After almost thirty years in LA, I’m still discovering new things. Whole new worlds even. Last Sunday we took a nice walk with Riverworld on our left and Golf World on our right, and then watched astonished as Golf World gave way to Horse & Cowboy World. Our dogs had cabin fever. My wife Elise had heard about a good place to walk dogs along the LA River in Los Feliz. I’m ashamed to say, though we live in Cypress Park/Mt. Washington, not far from the majestic Great Heron Gates to the paths along the river, we’ve never really explored it. This was yet another access point, though, behind Los Feliz Cafe, which shares a parking lot with the lovely little Los Feliz Golf Course, a 9-hole 3-par municipal course. One of the great things that our taxes do for us. Rich people, of course, don’t need public golf courses. They have their own country clubs. We’re not allowed in. So they spend lots of money trying to talk the rest of us into believing that taxes are theft. But here’s a little gem of a gift from our taxes–a present that we’ve sweetly given to each other. Sure enough, we scrambled up a little dirt slope and there it was, a paved path along the LA River. And here’s the crazy thing: it’s actually a real river. Yes, it’s famously hemmed in by concrete for much of its length, with sides sloping down at about a 45 degree angle. But in recent years it’s been allowed to go native, to return partly to the wild, with vegetation growing up within it and around it; with big rocks sitting in it, water rushing by making little white water rapids; with little islands along the banks and even in...
Powerflows: Political Musings [Hippie Squared]
posted by Jeff Rogers
I keep coming back to the idea that we’re too much under the sway of what’s in the end, just a system of weights and measures gone haywire. Money, I’m talking about. And the whole monetary regime that we’re living and dying under right now — a towering teetering scaffolding built of tattered paper pretending to be bricks. And what is money, really? It has no inherent value of its own. It’s just a measurement. A measurement of perceived value. But somewhere along the line it seems to have come unmoored from its anchor. It no longer correlates reliably to any universal or ultimately defensible notion of value. And so I do fear more and more lately that we’ve gone too far down the road toward plutocracy to turn it around. There have been other flowerings of democracy in human history. We like to think of ourselves as unique, and of course we are in some ways, but there have been a number of iterations of democracy before us and many have come after us. One thing seems true, up to now: they never last long, historically-speaking. They bring on a golden age, a flowering of culture and science, advances in philosophy and human freedom, but they’re always corrupted, often into empire. It seems like the upper shelf-life limit for democracy is a few hundred years. Help me, students of history: has any democracy yet lasted longer than that? Eventually an elite of one kind or another figures out how to accrue enough power unto itself that by the time the others realize what’s happening it’s too late to prevent or reverse it. The only historical certainty is that the political-economic system we have now won’t last forever. It will change into something very different....
The Snail’s-Pace Chase [Hippie Squared]
posted by Jeff Rogers
I was living in Hollywood then, dead across from the last known address of the Black Dahlia at 1842 North Cherokee. It was the crack years in Los Angeles, and my once-tony neighborhood was a center of the trade. I lived in a grand old apartment building fallen on hard times, called Cliffwood Terrace, just a block and a half above Hollywood Boulevard and the Walk of Fame, with it’s then-greasy stars embedded in grimy cement; only half a block below Franklin Ave where it ran along the base of the Hollywood Hills; and within easy walking distance of Elizabeth Taylor and Judy Garland’s hand prints in concrete at the Chinese Theater. Yet if you did want crack, and you were a comparison shopper, then Cherokee and Yucca, half a block south of my apartment, was the place to go. Nearly round the clock you’d have your pick of four dealers, one on each corner of the intersection. Though I was never a customer I quickly leaned that I had nothing to fear from my neighborhood tradesmen. In fairly short order they even became friendly acquaintances. I’d give a smart nod and an “hola,” whenever I strolled past. Before long they’d perk right up when they saw me coming. They’d greet me with a chorus of smiles, nods, “holas” and “heys” from all four corners as I walked by. And I would return each one with scrupulous courtesy. Parking tickets were the problem for me in that neighborhood. My car got booted more than once. The posted street cleaning hours were positively uncivilized. 8am to 10am, two days a week, one side or the other of the street was forbidden to cars. As it was, parking in the area was at such a premium...
Wilderness Survival [Hippie Squared]
posted by Jeff Rogers
When I was nineteen I took a Wilderness Survival class at Lansing Community College. For the final we had to pair up with a classmate and survive a night without tent, sleeping bags or gear in the late fall Michigan woods. No snow, but still plenty cold enough to catch a nice case of hypothermia and die. The last class before the final we ate crickets fried in butter and picked our partners for the final. The crickets tasted like popcorn, except their shells crunched, and their little legs got caught in my teeth. I was a part-time student and it was a night class. I hadn’t really made friends with anyone. So I got stuck with the last guy who had no partner. Carl, his name was. Short, stocky and pudgy, with dark hair and a goatee. The kind of guy who talked like he knew all the answers, but if he ever actually listened he might have learned that he was mostly full of shit. The instructor, Mr. Green, looked every bit the mountain man scholar, with his barrel chest, glasses, and bushy beard. His uniform never varied: hiking boots, jeans, flannel shirts and a puffy down vest. A dedicated backpacker, he had hiked the entire Appalachian trail. He had camped solo on Isle Royal in the middle of Lake Michigan, serenaded to sleep by one of the last remaining wolf-packs in the continental U.S. The man knew his subject. “My Wilderness Survival class is basically pass-fail,” he said. “If you and your partner survive the night, you get an A. If either one of you gets hypothermia and dies, you both fail the class.” We’d seen a very scary film about hypothermia earlier in the term. When your core body-temperature dropped too low for...
Hippie Squared: Some Things I Remember and Some I Don’t
posted by Jeff Rogers
I was working the Sunset Strip that night. I pulled my cab over to the curb in front of the Rainbow, or Gazzari’s, or the Coconut Teaser. It was a Friday or a Saturday night in early 1987—a long time ago. There are some things I remember, and some things I don’t. I remember her. She got into the cab first, while he held the back door open and I watched over my shoulder. She ducked her head and her straight dark hair hung down, a little mussed. She lifted her face as she sat and it was utterly lovely. Lovely and young. I was young, then, too. But she was younger. She held her long gray-and-white checked coat tightly closed with one hand. With the other she tucked it under her bare thighs as she slid along the seat. As the full length of her legs came into my sight between the seats I saw that she was barefoot too. She caught my eyes and gave me a shy, up-from-under look. Up from under long lashes. And shy, yes, but she held my gaze. As if she might have a secret. A secret she might like to share. He climbed in after her. I have no memory of what he wore. Black, probably. Short, tousled, dirty-blond hair. Chiseled features. A good-looking enough guy. Not a match for her necessarily, but not too much of a stretch. The English accent closed the gap, when he opened his mouth to tell me where to take them. Not posh; it sounded working-class to me. “Could you please find us a liquor store? Or somewhere we can pick up a bottle of something? Then on to Venice? To the beach?” He looked at her, patted her thigh, and...
Hippie Squared: Macaroni Superstar
posted by Jeff Rogers
Yes, it’s only from a box. But the classic, Kraft Dinner-style, bright, nearly radioactive orange mac ‘n’ cheese is a sensual treasure and a deep comfort. Properly prepared, it’s a fallen beauty elevated anew in this cardboard modern world—a redemption of the cheap and commercial. First you boil the water, until the lid of the pot clatters a tin discordant improv. You pull out a few little tubes of macaroni, with a slotted spoon, run just a dash of cold water over them; put them to your lips, test them. Bite down gently, slurp them into your mouth and chew. You’re looking for al dante—not too soft, not too firm—the firmness of an aroused nipple held gently between loving teeth. When it’s like that, just right, you dump it in the colander, then back into the pot. The art is in the mix of butter, milk and cheese. First carve off little chunks of butter, stir them into the still-steaming macaroni, until it’s uniformly coated, until it shines, until rivulets of yellow butter swim at the bottom. Time to add in the cheese. One can’t stress enough the delicacy of this. Don’t dump it all in at once. Sprinkle about a third of the contents of the cheese envelope over the buttered macaroni. Then add a dollop of milk, and stir. Listen to the sound of the stirring, the squishiness of it, as the noodles slide against each other and around the pot and tumble over each other. Continue to add cheese and milk, alternating, careful that you aim for creamy, but not milky or watery, and not too dry. Luscious, is what you’re after. The perfect balance that would make Goldilocks exclaim, “Just right!” at the creamy orange goodness of it, the lip-smacking squishiness of it,...
Hippie Squared: Gold Country Gold [FaN Favorites]
posted by Jeff Rogers
. a favorite blogumn by Jeff Rogers Jeff Says: It wasn’t easy for me to pick a favorite “Hippie Squared” to rerun. I’m pleased to find how many of them I’m still happy with. But “Gold Country Gold” has a few things to recommend it. It might be the most purely crafted of them all. It was only my third one, so I was still taking Ernessa’s 300 word limit seriously. So it’s tight. I like the characters, I like the dialogue, I like the local color. I like the punchline. And it’s all true. But the ultimate reason I chose it? It’s my wife’s favorite. And she has good taste. So Sweet Elise, this one’s for you, babe. Enjoy. From November 24, 2008 “Out here we grow amunds. ‘Almonds’ are what we sell.” Lou’s giving me the tour. “This year the birds got ‘em all. Wasn’t worth knockin’ one tree.” Past the almond groves their acreage ends at the edge of a tree-filled canyon. Successive ridges of oak-dotted yellow hills climb to the gray line of Sierra Nevadas. Three canyons over the gold rush began. My wife and I have taken her mother to see cousin Bertie for the first time in fifty years. They grew up together, third generation San Franciscans. Irish great grandfather fled the potato famine. Grandfather “Pop-pop” owned seven saloons on the Barbary Coast and a famous night spot in San Francisco. The first floor was a public restaurant. The second floor an exclusive one. Third floor was the brothel. Bertie takes in refugees. She takes us to feed the burro his nightly garlic bread. He’s as big around as he is long. “He loves his garlic bread.” Someone shot the burro’s friend the goat. And bobcats got the chickens. But they’ve...
Hippie Squared: That Curious Ribbon (The Essential Metaphor)
posted by Jeff Rogers
Lately I’ve been thinking about life as a journey again–the inescapable, essential metaphor: That Curious Ribbon What other metaphor Can I really imagine for all this Than a journey Down a ribbon of road? Then the metaphors crowd in. Just to ask is to call them round. But I take off running that curious ribbon And leave them all behind. Each day I need my pinch– Just a pinch to get by– Of leave-taking. Just to waver in my body for that sweet instant. Trudging up a dusty path through scrub Five puffing minutes to command a vista Successive rows of hills and houses Infinite sky and tumbling clouds. Just to waver in my self for that sweet instant. The threat of leaving. The promise of leaving. The necessity to stay. Each day I long to lose my way. Just one wrong turn each day I pray Will keep me Squarely on my way. This body with its tastes. This skin with what it knows and finds. These eyes that sting and baptize. Never can it all be seen, never. Each face looks out With the eyes of every face And every arrow points north. But every arrow is set spinning in the wind. Friends pull round the fire and rest Call out stories and jokes Swirl in their own heads and sing. In the morning each one heads north In a different direction. Each head will find its own pillow. Whether on stones or feathers Some heads are harder than others. What metaphor is found by this one When this one finally lays down But the sleep at the end of the day The bed in some far elbow of the road? And that curious ribbon Winds on through dreams Swallows its own...
Hippie Squared: Coffee
posted by Jeff Rogers
. by Jeff Rogers and Scott Roat Black and silver spools, an uncoiling ribbon, architecture of feverish reveries built on bricks of beans; an egg, blue, sliding across the plate, a slick track of oil collects at the lip; wash it away with coffee, holy coffee, energy oil, tincture of high wire nerves; the sleepy reason, as clouds part, releasing Gothic sunshine curves as the first drop uncoils from the black spool, warming my mouth; illusion of time returns uncoiling in a black and silver morning stretch; the crisp skin of bacon, overcooked, crumbles its brittle bones between my teeth; membrane of egg peeled back from plate, slivers of crunch potato, tears of crunch bread; thin dollops of purple jam crease the corners of my mouth; all to bed the stream for black and silver baptism, all for steam and rush of holy bean distilled: a gemstone, a black diamond in the center of the plate, unconscionably large, black, and unashamed, sacred tincture between earth and sky, ageless compression of the holy bean; balm for the weary, prop for the weak, mediator for disputes of philosophers, centerpiece at the peace table, shameless bean carry me off to breakfast, where I swell with the day–release, release! lay me back in gentle brown river uncoiled. Today’s coffee, pictured above: Double cortado from Cafe Tropical, Los...
Hippie Squared: Wishing for a Pair of Wings and a Set of Goggles
posted by Jeff Rogers
Wishing for a pair of wings and a set of goggles, Warren Crutch washed the floor, while his elderly mother hovered nearby, and when he finished, he left the house. He walked the late afternoon streets alone until he reached the home of his girlfriend, Alabaster Lane. With blonde hair and yellow teeth, she lived in a dark walk-up, where they watched the night fall and felt each other breathing. The streets that took him there were not set at right angles, none of the corners he turned were ninety degrees. He felt there was no way to get to her dwelling without wasting space, turning extraneous corners and then having to steal back the lost degrees later, at further mislaid corners. He always walked the same set of streets, but he looked for new combinations, more economical paths to lead him to his dense darling, Alabaster Lane. She poured him wine, in a porcelain mug she’d bought for him, stained in dark rings all the way up, at different levels for the different amounts he’d drunk before they set aside the wine and touched each other. He thought he could figure out the age of their relationship if he just once counted the rings in his mug, but whenever he thought to, it was already too late and if he tried to focus on the rings they all blurred together and he would think, “Oh yes, that’s right, I’ve loved her forever,” and he would put aside the mug and kiss her. Next time he saw her the wine would still be there, on the table by the bed, and they would dump it into the sink and pour a new portion. And she would pour herself one too. The streets he walked, he...
Hippie Squared: Penetrating the Wizard’s Bookshelf [Father’s Day]...
posted by Jeff Rogers
When I was a kid my dad was a private detective. He was a spy. He was a master scientist and a crusader for justice. He was a wizard. His bookshelves held the keys to his powers. They loomed above me there in his den where I slept when I visited him on weekends. Jacked up on Pepsi and potato chips, I would lie awake for hours scanning the titles. They held secrets. They held clues. They held knowledge, wisdom, spells and formulas. I memorized their titles and the swirling art on their covers. I read the back cover blurbs, the quotes from critics, the forewords and prefaces and afterwords. I scanned their indexes for the power words and concepts. I dipped into their contents and read a sentence here, a paragraph there. How could one person master it all, I wondered. How could I ever hope to be as well-read, as well-informed, as penetrating and wise. I loved to watch my dad, the 70s divorced bachelor professor, hold forth at parties. I liked to watch the eyes turned toward him, the people assembled around him suspended on the line of his conversation. It always seemed to me that whatever the voices in the room, my dad’s came out definitive. “Of course,” I would think, when I heard him lay out with clarity the injustices of racism, segregation, chauvinism. He would eagerly argue for the Equal Rights Amendment or Affirmative Action against anyone, of any race, man or woman. He’d flay Nixon with glee. The Vietnam War, once he got ahold of it, was transparently a mistake, a waste. He seemed to gain stature—like Gandalf in Tolkein’s descriptions of how he would transform from a bent old man into an imposing figure when riled...
Hippie Squared: Before the Jump
posted by Jeff Rogers
So with a blog due last night and a basketball game to watch, I thought I’d try a little experiment: write a poem about the game in real time as I watched the game. Didn’t get very far: Elise came home with dinner, we paused the game, fed the dogs and cats, had pina coladas on the patio, came back and watched the rest together. But I got a chunk out of it that I like. And I aim to continue the practice throughout the series, so by the next Hippie Squared I’ll have more. In the meantime, after the jump, a little basketball poem I’m calling “Before the Jump.” Before the Jump (Lakers-Celtics NBA Finals 2010 Game 2 Impressions) It starts from before the beginning: Player introductions. Laker Center Andrew Bynum bounces out Shoulder-butts a teammate and spins off him. Derek Fisher ducks and crab-walks out through standing teammates, Brushing each hand, then in a ritual series of hand motions He pats his thighs, cross-brushes his lapels, passes both hands Across his bald head, pats his lapels. Kobe strides out, brushing and slapping a gauntlet of teammates hands, His game-face on: mouth face set, eyes focused straight ahead And right past the present into the game, unflashy bravado of the champion, The one who has done it and knows how to do it How it works and feels in the mind Where championships are won, how it works and feels in the body, Where championships are won. Phil Jackson with his clipboard is inscrutable, unreadable, calmer than anyone. How many times has he been here before? He’s climbed this Everest More than most and he’s used to the thin air up here, He can breathe at this height and in this pressure, He’s...
Hippie Squared: Woulds (Elegy for a Mystic Poet Died Too Soon)
posted by Jeff Rogers
. a blogumn by Jeff Rogers I think the advice that we give to others is often exactly what we need to hear ourselves. Have you noticed that? Do you agree? I wrote this poem years ago for a talented, charismatic, ambitious poet I knew named Tony Clay. We were in a poetry performance group that evolved into a theater troupe called Gary Pony back in 1989-90. He was once described by mistake in a poetry reading flyer as “Frantic Poet Tony Clay” and the description always stuck in my mind because it was so appropriate. It seemed he could not be still. He was into the occult, he was charismatic and good-looking and he liked to seduce men, women and more men. He liked altering his state of consciousness, he liked club-hopping, he liked the glamor of being a poet. He really seemed to be banking on the idea that some sweeping change in human consciousness was going to come about by all of us doing our poetry and performance thing, and then he wouldn’t have to worry about anything practical ever again, he’d be loved and revered as the mystic shaman poet master that he was. He ended up alienating many of his friends (a good story for another time), contracting HIV and getting beaten up in an alley in Paris and dying shortly after in a Paris hospital. I wrote this poem for his memorial and read it for him then. I’d said much of this to him once in a phone conversation, but of course it didn’t make any difference. If you’ve been following Hippie Squared and Three Line Lunch lately you might have noticed I’ve been thinking a lot about how to ground myself in the present moment, get out of...
Hippie Squared: Forget Foucault! Damn Derrida! Stan’s the Postmodern Man!...
posted by Jeff Rogers
I’ve been reading some of the old Marvel comics lately (look no farther than Three Line Lunch #239 for the evidence) in collections—early issues of Spider-Man in the Marvel Masterworks color reprint series and tonight one of the first Iron Man comics in Essential Iron Man, a black and white collection. It’s fun stuff. It’s also incredibly postmodern. I think that might be one of the reasons so many currently hip literary guys—Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem leap to mind—not only liked comics, but Marvel in particular. What initially struck me as so postmodern is the self-consciousness of the hype. Issue #11’s cover blazes: “The Long-Awaited Return of Doctor Octopus!” It’s only issue #11—how long could the wait have been? Issue #12’ cover calls itself, “The latest…the greatest Spider-Man Super Spectacular.” When it’s really just another issue, and everybody knows it. But the hype is done with a wink. It’s all part of the fun. The postmodern stuff seems to all come from Stan Lee. I think he’s an archetypal postmodernist. There’s a whole meta-narrative created by his constant referencing of himself, the artists, and the fact and process of creating the comic books you’re reading—much of that meta-narrative carried in and around the hype. The splash page of issue #14, which introduces the Green Goblin for the first time (and guest stars the Hulk), proclaims—in three separate word boxes, each a different shape: “Only the Merry Marvel Madmen could have dreamed him up!” — in an arrow-shaped box pointing to this rectangular box: “Here’s how it happened: The gang at the bullpen said let’s give our fans the greatest 12 cents worth we can! Let’s get a really different villain…a bunch of colorful henchmen for him…and let’s even add a great guest star!! So, we...
Hippie Squared: Twenty-One Line Brunch
posted by Jeff Rogers
. a blogumn by Jeff Rogers So my other feature on this site is Three Line Lunch, my diary in three line poems–one of which will run later today, if I get it finished in time. I first took on the project of a year-long diary in three line poems from September 1, 1993 through August 31, 1994. Which by grand design of the Muses turned out to be the year I met and courted my wife, so that got me some good stuff. And over the years since, every now and then I’ve found myself returning to the wonderfully flexible, nearly formless form (as I have practiced it, anyway) of the three line poem. Anyway, here I am on the night my Hippie Squared piece is due, and I got nothin’. Ernessa suggested I do a thing about cutting my hair, which is a great idea, but it’s growing into a larger meditation on change, and I’m still working on it. So for fun, I thought I’d run a few of the old three-liners from sixteen years ago. Back then there was no such thing as the world wide web. Or was there? I don’t remember. If so, it was early going, and I sure didn’t post my daily poems on it. I did read them out at coffee houses, though. Including a few of these. Guess you could call this a kind of Hippie Squared/TLL crossover/mash-up. Enjoy. First off, on one of the most common battles between the sexes — sleeping temperature negotiations: Nocturnalistical Intemperatures I’m too hot, she’s too cold; peas porridge in the pot nine days old. Fan in spinny and windy open: I happy, she freezy. Fan unspinny and windy down: she’s toasty, everything’s breezy. About my old cat Shadow, now a...
Hippie Squared: Red Sleeping
posted by Jeff Rogers
. a blogumn by Jeff Rogers Leaving his body was very hard; for a long time I couldn’t do it. I just kept stroking his fur, and getting down and hugging him, from behind, like I would do in bed when it was a cold night and he would move up and lie next to me for warmth. I’d hold him from behind with my hand holding his chest, his rib cage, where the fur was white. He was so soft. I also kept putting my face down next to his, the soft fur on his cheek, kissing his snout and his cheek, the ruff there—knowing I’d never feel it again, memorizing the feeling, as I had been for months while he lived with the cancer, so that particular unique sensation would remain within my sense memory for as long as possible. Elise asked for scissors to cut off a lock of his fur. We ended up cutting several locks from different places. From the fringe up near his front leg, from the ruff collar around his head. Some of the white from his chest. Elise set up a little shrine to him at home. She went through old photos and found a great one of his “JFK look,” looking very noble and handsome (not digital, unfortunately, or I’d post it here). She nestled the photo, and the locks of fur in a small basket, inside his rugged, beat-up leather collar, with a candle between, and now the cedar box of his ashes, on the mantel. For anyone who’s never loved a dog, this might all seem a little elaborate and excessive. Anyone who has loved a dog will understand. It’s a wordless love on one side of the equation, and yet the communication...
Hippie Squared: Red My Old Dog in the Morning
posted by Jeff Rogers
. a blogumn by Jeff Rogers I admit it. He was my favorite. My favorite dog ever in the whole wide world. And he died two Saturdays ago. If you follow my “Three Line Lunch” feature here on Fierce and Nerdy then you might have read about it. And you might have read some of my previous chronicles of Red’s decline, as he aged and as his cancer took hold. I wrote about our trip north to Mendocino to take him to the redwoods one last time, because he always loved camping and the outdoors. The photograph you see here is from that trip; the three-line poem that accompanies it is here. We took him down into a truly primeval and magical redwood forest, but he was so old and arthritic that he couldn’t really make it back out on his own. So I hoisted him on my shoulder and carried him about half a mile out the trail to the car. He seemed quite happy about the whole arrangement. That’s the thing about Red. He was a truly happy fellow. One of the sweetest souls I’ve ever known on planet earth, human or animal. His happiness was infectious. He had the softest fur of any dog I’ve ever petted. The most common reaction when people would pet him for the first time: you could see them visibly relax. The tension would drain out of their faces. And then pretty much word for word, with little variation, they’d say, in a tone of wonder: “Oh, he’s so soft.” We were lucky, all of us—my wife Elise, me, and particularly Red. He kept that happiness to his last day. I’m sure when he was actually dying he wasn’t all that happy, but he didn’t seem to...
Hippie Squared: Can I Make a Blog Out of This?
posted by Jeff Rogers
What do I write about for my blogumn today—which is late, by the way? What kept me lying awake in bed this morning when I woke up before dawn? All the things I have to take care of. All the things on my mind. Mindfulness is on my mind. Thankfulness is on my mind—but plaguing me. There are people I haven’t thanked, people I’ve neglected, whole areas of my life gone fallow. Long lost family I’ve not talked to in years, family friends, all of that. There are plane tickets, plans to make for a trip back to the Midwest for my niece’s bat mitzvah and transport of my mom’s old furniture and books and papers out here, a cross country trip with my brother Ray. There are money matters that need attending to, book balancing and budgeting. This blogumn is overdue. I’ve been out of work for awhile; going back next week; been hearing rumors of what’s been happening there when I’ve been gone and at some point I’ll have to turn my attention in that direction, figure out what I’ll be walking into when I return. There’s stuff on this computer that’s important to me that I haven’t backed-up yet. How is it that all of it piles up? I turned off my 6:30 alarm at 6am this morning and got up and sat down at this computer and began to type. Can I make a blog out of all this? There are probably any number of blogs I could make out of this, if I pick a direction and go with it. At least I feel a little empowered now, because I’m writing this, and at the same time I’m downloading the new version of iTunes to my computer and my...
Hippie Squared: I Think, Therefore I Ramble Through My Moments
posted by Jeff Rogers
I’ve been working on mindfulness lately. What do I mean by that? Well, to take myself as the starting point: I think, therefore I ramble. I think and think and think and therefore I am unfocused. I like thinking. I’m a fan of it. I’m doing it pretty much all the time. But too often my thoughts are like a kite on a cross-windy day—leaping up, diving down, darting left, darting right, executing a spontaneous pattern of loops and curls and straight short shots. My thinking is often a speech, or a dialogue, or a monologue, directed outward, toward an imagined audience of one or millions. I am explaining how I came to write a poem. I’m holding forth on Obama and the ungovernability of the United States in the 21st century. Maybe I’m lost in a righteous argument with someone. Or just telling a funny story, or saying something wise. Rarely am I thinking directly to myself. More importantly, in a way, for mindfulness: rarely am I standing solidly in my present space and time, without a constant commentary track that usually isn’t even talking about the movie I’m watching—what’s actually going on in the here and now. It’s off somewhere and somewhen else—a remembered past, an imagined future, a conjured alternate timeline. I’ve written here before about my theory of the moment as the essential unit of human experience. Like an atom is to matter, the moment is to our experience of our lives. And because each of us is different from each other and moving through time on our own individual track, each moment you have belongs only to you. No one else gets your moment. And you get each moment only once. You can never recreate it. At best you can only partially...
Hippie Squared: Secret Beach & Sweet Elise Answers
posted by Jeff Rogers
Earlier in the week our friend directed us to a secret beach north of Malibu. When we came over the mountains and saw the ocean, at first look it was almost gray in the late afternoon sun. It was cut by hills, and off to the right it looked even more gray. Until we realized that off to the right we were seeing clouds, hanging over the ocean. “Clouds are really just an ocean in the sky,” said Elise. We climbed a trail to the bluffs above the secret beach. We brought wine but no glasses, so we passed the bottle back and forth. We ate cheese and pate and crackers, cherries and grapes. Dark chocolate truffles and a chocolate eclair. We held hands, we kissed. We shared our secret silence on the secret bluffs above the secret beach. We watched the hawks soar, the pelicans glide, and the gulls flap. We saw creatures out in the ocean and tried to decide if they were dolphins or seals. In the end, I believe we decided they were both: those with dorsal fins were dolphins, those with flat fin tails were seals. And we watched the whole colorful progress of the sunset, from the orange ball of fire sitting on the horizon, to the pink wisps of clouds trailing above the horizon after the ball of fire fell below it, to the deep dusk that gave us more secret space for deeper secret kisses. It was sort of an early Valen