Counting Sheep

Had to hop a plane early Friday morning, so I went to bed early and was wide awake by midnight. That's how it goes when you've just got to get those seven or eight hours of uninterrupted sleep, knowing that after the flight, you'll be driving five hours and better be wide awake. Now, some people count sheep, but I'm not one of those. I count people I've wronged over the years, and all my bad decisions, no matter how minor.

When I was a kid, Pete and I used to walk down to McDonald's a few times a week. Pete lived in an apartment, which I thought was cool, since we lived in a house. We were best friends through most of elementary school, starting with our Ronald McDonald puppet show we performed for Miss Paul's first grade class. That was before she got pregnant and left us for good.

Puppets are one thing, but super glue's another. I discovered super glue later on, and one day as we walked down to McDonald's, I noticed a brick in the road across the street from where the guy who chased Pete and my other friend, Wing, with a heroin needle lived. He wasn't out chasing kids with needles this time, but besides the brick, there was also a gold-colored Chevy Nova parked where it always was. This is where putting two and two together comes into play. I picked up the brick and glued it to the side of the car, but it fell off. So I glued it to the hood, instead, and off we ran.

Once we got to high school a few years later, Pete and I drifted apart. I became a pothead for about a year, till I discovered cross country. During my time as a druggie (frequent pot, angel dust once, acid once) and unhappy loner, I invited another friend over and introduced him to marijuana. I'm not going to name him, but I think it's my fault he later got hooked on heroin. Not something I suggested he do, and had he asked, I would have advised him not to, but still, I opened the door. Luckily, he gave it up, eventually, but my God, what if he had died?

Karma's a b*tch and is often asymmetrical, which is why I figure the reason I've suffered with irritable bowel syndrome for forty plus years and anxiety for close to thirty is because of that brick and the heroin, along with other wrongs I've perpetrated against the innocent ever since I was a young boy.

Maybe I should just count sheep.

America Is an Oddball’s Paradise

I don't know much about the outside world. Born in LA, lived in California most of my life. Now here we are in Boise, not far from where the explorer Donald Mackenzie passed through on his way to Astoria. Up until our Japan trip two years ago, I'd only ever been to Canada and Mexico, and all that was long, long ago. Never served in the military, though I've photographed a lot of soldiers and vets and their families.

Regardless, I still think that of all the places you can be, America is an oddball's paradise. I mean that in a good way. Here, if anybody tells you what to do, you can just tell em to f*ck off. That's freedom.

You can be Taylor Swift, or Guy Fieri. You can be nobody. You can rise above the noise to where everybody knows who you are, despite the fierce competition and fragmented centers of attention. How is that even possible in an age when we design our own radio stations? Three hundred million radio stations with an audience of one. And yet, we still have the household names, the megastars, the supernova one-hit wonders who come crashing down to earth because they weren't really what we wanted, after all.

I keep telling myself I need a real job, because who the hell hires a storyteller? Especially an old one who doesn't want to travel the back roads in a microbus, surfing couches and performing on street corners till something miraculous clicks. There's more than one way to stage a meteoric rise. Those who scream "my way or the highway" are usually the ones who make it.

I actually like the idea of a real job, with good pay and benefits, along with enough soul left over at the end of the day to continue slogging on fameward. All those Taylor Swifts started out pressing labels onto shampoo bottles before they became the shampoo. Nothing wrong with being an employee, even if it ends up being forever. Tell that to your business coach.

Just don't quit being Taylor Swift. Why am I even picking on her? I'm neither fan nor not fan, "but if memories were all I sang, I'd rather drive a truck." I dredge up a lot of memories as I forge ahead, and part of me wants to be more forward looking. Besides me, who cares about Dylan and Petty and Muhammad Ali, or Sonny Liston, for goodness sake? Who cares about Louis Barney Katz? I'm not saying you should.

Let's face it. Being whoever you are can be an oddball proposition. Don't let anyone (except your husband or your wife) tell you what to do.

Moses’ 115th Plague

Helen, who’d recently arrived from Memphis after her scene with Paris, burst into the Jade Room with Pharaoh’s goblet, which was either half full or half empty, depending on your perspective. “He’s back!” she exclaimed, out of breath, handing him the goblet.

“Who’s back?” he asked, looking up lazily from a more important task, which was filing his hangnails. He took a drink from the goblet and spit it out. “I said regular, not diet!” He honestly didn’t know who’s back.

“You know!” she said.

“No! I don’t know!”

“Big old guy with long hair and a beard!”

Ramses scratched his head. “That could be anyone!” he screamed. He was supposed to be nice to Helen, who was here on loan from Proteus while Menelaus made his way down from Greece to fetch her. What a mess all that had turned out to be. He said “sorry for yelling” and looked at her kindly.

“The one with the staff!” She was only here for tourist season and hadn't gotten everyone’s names straight yet.

“You mean Moses?”" he scowled.

Helen jumped up and down and said, “YES! Moses!”

“Send him in,” said the pharaoh, cursing under his breath. “I’ll show him what’s what,” but she was already gone.

In comes Moses, with his staff, standing there, not shaking pharaoh’s hand. The sort of behavior that could land you in a pit of asps. But he was Moses, and everyone was used to his eccentricities.

“Let my people go!” he said, same as ever. The pharaoh always mocked him. “Let my people go! Let my people go! Bah!” Then there’d be another plague, this one worse than the previous. We were now up to boils and cattle disease, which were pretty bad, though quite popular at modern Passover seders.

The pharaoh glared or maybe even glowered at Moses, pointing towards the door. “Get out of here, I’ll tear you limb from limb.”

“You know they refused Jesus, too.”

He said “You’re not Him. Get out of here before I break your bones, I ain’t your pop.”

“I’ll have you arrested,” said Moses, and he went looking for a cop. But the cops threw him out on his cape and laughed. “Arrest the pharaoh? Ha!”

“You’ll be sorry! Just you wait and see!” So Moses left the cops, who were still laughing, and he went straight to God, who was beholden to no one, not even the pharaoh. “I tried to reason with him, but I can’t get past his damn hangnails.”

God said, “so be it.” Then, as if to pharaoh, he raised his voice to where everyone in the room could hear. “Don’t say I never warned you.” To Moses, “which do you prefer, hail? Or locusts?”

Moses thought for a minute and said, “Hail. You’ve got to build up to locusts. How about a twofer? Hit him with hail, and then do the locusts right afterwards. That’ll grab his attention.”

“I don’t do twofers,” God said. “Very well. Hail it is.”

The sky opened up above the pharaoh’s palace, and hail the size of goat’s heads fell from the heavens, making loud, crashing sounds, breaking windows, denting car hoods, and even landing in the pharaoh’s soup. “Moses!” he cried. “Get me Moses!”

The same cops who’d earlier laughed at him grabbed Moses outside Taco Time, where they serve the best tater tots, only they call them Mexi-fries to be more culturally accurate. “Pharaoh wants to see you,” said Chief Moab.

“Tell him I’ll swing by after lunch,” Moses said, continuing to chew on his Mexi-fries, but more slowly now. The cops left, but they came back with reinforcements, and Chief Moab said, “aren’t you done yet? Man, you sure eat slow.” They left again, only this time, they didn’t come back.

Moses wrapped up his lunch and stuck it in one of the pockets of his multi-colored dream coat (the one handed down to him from Joseph), then he made his way back to the palace to see pharaoh. Helen showed him in. I don’t know why he even bothered, it was always the same.

“Let my people go!” Moses cried.

“Let my people go!” the pharaoh mocked. “Get outta here!”

“You’re really not going to like the next one,” said Moses, knowing it was locusts.

“Get out!” screamed the pharaoh, and so Moses left, shaking his head, wondering why God wouldn’t just allow the Children of Israel to let themselves go, and to hell with pharaoh and his chariots of fire.

He turned to Helen on his way out, letting loose a satisfactory belch. “You can come with us, you know.”

She flashed her “takes one to know one” smile. “No,” was all she said.

He gave her a thumbs up as he walked out the door, figuring even the locusts wouldn’t change pharaoh’s mind.