BEEN OFF THE GRID

Soul Searching Amongst the Sequoia

Dearest Subscribers:

Since my last missive, wherein I lost my job, I have had a great outpouring of support and affection and generosity and kindness from you all, and it made my life feel worthwhile and will make my months to come a bit easier. If I haven’t thanked you personally, it is because I couldn’t figure out how. But thank you personally, from every rampart of my bloody black heart. It is a privilege to write for you. Gratitude of a thousand elephants dressed in spangles. You are all life-affirming people, and I fucking love you. — CW

Before I was let go from the wine bar, I had already bought tickets West to visit Killer Joe, the boyfriend who has surpassed extremely difficult boyfriend hurdles (Girlfriend is kicked out of apartment by now estranged family members! Girlfriend moves back East! Girlfriend loses job she moved for!) with ease and grace.

Joe has spent decades running homeless shelters and needle exchanges. He’s a scholar/poet/athlete/nurse. A little on the Aspy side, but who among us isn’t neurodiverse? He’s got the Irish gift of gab, but he’s dead interesting; a historian of past subcultures and their wigged-out interests. He’s as good as having the TV on, even if he does ramble a bit. He has a 24-7 poker face that rarely cracks into a smile. He got it working in San Quentin, he says. It makes his reactions (or lack of them) sometimes confusing, but he’s got a kind of William S. Burroughs, sightly reptilian, somewhat sibilant calm, and the natural authority of being the only adult in the room who can potentially save 18 others, if the walls were to cave in.

Plus, we both smoke American Spirits. We’re both going to stop.

Anyway, Joe hung out with my sister, my Sainted brother-in-law, and my nephews and nieces, for whom I had a mini-Christmas in our room at the Holiday Inn Express. I decided to have Xmas with the kids on December 8, because the air fares were so low, and I wouldn’t have to go through the human sausage factory that is JFK during the holidays. I gave all the kids gifts, and gift certificates for the video game Roblox which has been dominating their lives for the last couple of years — the eight year old twins and the nieces, 11 and 13. I tried to play it once and determined that it was so visually fast and strobe-y and saturated, my brain was too old. It made me queasy. I wanted to hang with them in that space, but it was like a dog whistle screaming in my head saying “BACK OFF AUNTIE. Nobody controls your children here.”

Anyway, I got that priceless satisfaction from giving kids things they like. Stuffies. Running shoes. Elf costumes. Warmth and little faces.

It was a happy time. Then we all went and ate matzoh ball soup at the next door restaurant.

Next Killer Joe drove us into the mountains near Yosemite to visit his legendary sisters: mountain women of great and virtuous character, who can still scale mountainsides like bobcats well into their 60’s. Irish ranch ladies of interesting talents, horses and general rectitude.

Joe took me Yosemite, which I had never seen before. His family had settled there in the 1800s. It was a lovely hike among the great redwoods to this gargantuan fucking monster of a sequoia they call the Grizzly Giant, that has been there 1790 years, talking to the stars every night.

Yosemite became a conservation site due to the fact that John Muir bro’d down with Teddy Roosevelt by camping with him there. Teddy was awestruck by the magnitude of the nature there.

“Yosemite is like looking straight at God,” my friend Mo said, sincerely.

I was pretty awestruck, but I gotta tell ya, from all the postcards and pictures I’d seen over the years of Half Dome and El Capitan, I was really expecting Yosemite to be much larger. It looked very beautiful and sympathetic to me because it was quaintly small, like the Hoover Dam. A little jewelbox of Godly engineering.

I don’t know if that means I’ve watched so much television that my brain has gone soft, but it is possible. Yosemite did fill me with a wish not to return to the overflowing trashcans and rats of deepest Brooklyn.

California was absolutely scorched in huge swaths across the landscape along highway 1, as we were driving by. Joe would point out that the redwoods, once they are burned down to a blackened stick, sprout tiny branches all over themselves after a fire. I’m feeling a bit like that myself.

It was an appropriate image to see before the X concert. X — the punk band featuring John Doe, Exene Cervenka, Billy Zoom and DJ Bonebreak - has been one of my favorite bands since I was a teenager. The last time I saw an X concert I was 19, and as I stood at the front of the stage, at the feet of John Doe, a large and beautiful mohawk’d boy stood next to me. John Doe smiled at us, because we looked like a couple. The mohawk casually handed me the joint he had been smoking, and we bathed together in John Doe’s approval. It was like we had been dating for months, the mohawk and I. A magic memory.

This time, at the X concert, it was impossible not to notice that everyone in the audience was between the ages of 55-70, including Killer Joe and myself. “Holy fuck,” I told Joe. “We’re sweating to the oldies.”

“Yah, we’re them now,” offered Joe.

Still, it was another magic moment, standing on the concrete floor of the venue watching X play as well as they had decades ago and shouting their lyrics, this time with my very own punk rock boyfriend. A circle felt squared.

It’s hard not to feel like human beings are just another form of parasite on earth. We make it break out in parking garages and mattress stores. Natural beauty belongs to everyone, which is why there is now so little of it — it is being privately collected, owned and hoarded. But the feeling I really like, which is one I’ve had on mushrooms a few times, is the dead certainty that we came from this planet. It grew us, and we’re a part of its fauna. We’re not separate from anything, but a part of the ecosystem that should be its stewards. The planet certainly doesn’t belong to us, but we are part of it, however egocentric our species may be, over something as intangible and unreliable as sentience.

This Christmas I’ll be going over to my friend Mo’s house. It’s mighty cold in Brooklyn these days, and I’ll be spending the rest of the holidays frantically painting and editing in order to make enough money to hopefully move back West again.

I wish you all the happiest of winter holidays. The greatest gift I’ve received this year is the kindness of my readers, for whom I have gratitude that so fills the heart it makes the ears thrum.

I return to my regularly scheduled weekly schedule, from now on.

Love, CW

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Theme song: Jack Black