The Government will conduct a performance risk assessment.

Harper's magazine. March 2008.

Kahlil Gibran: On Children

Kahlil Gibran was my mother's favorite poet/philosopher, and this poem was her guiding light.

In the Canyon: July 1-9.

The Canyon trip was truly Grand. Hot as hell (topping off at 125 in the sun, 108 in the shade), but we did most of our hiking between 3am and 9am, then sat in the crystal cool waters of Bright Angel Creek during the day. Phantom Ranch had Buttwipers and a swamp-cooler lodge, thank you. The side hikes were amazing. The view of the Colorado from Plateau Point, a mile and a half from Indian Gardens, 3000 feet above the river, was, well, surreal? The River Trail, cut into the cliffs high above the nexus of Bright Angel and the river: I could not do it photographic justice. Ah, the immensity of it all. So much time, so much earth to erode.
The last two days we spent on the north rim, which is an entirely different micro-climate: cool, wet, Ponderosa pines, beautiful green meadows, kind of like Oregon, yet, always, when you emerge from the forest, the humbling edge, the multitudinous, variegated colors, and, for the brain, the utter impossibility of the great abyss--even after looking at it for days, it's still just a painting on the wall. There's a hotel up there that sits on the edge, where you can have a drink and watch the sun set. Or you can have breakfast in their dining room, which looks south across that terrible hole. Something else with eggs over easy. And because it's a 250-mile drive from the tourist-packed south rim, the humans are few and far between. Wunderbar!


From Plateau Point. A couple of rafts down there.

Indian Gardens.

North Rim View.

The Grand Canyon of the Colorado

Cougar/Mountain Lion
Thanks to: http://dhreno.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/mtnlion.jpg
I’m heading for the Grand Canyon three weeks from today with a couple other old farts. We’ll be in the abyss for five nights, then up to the North Rim for a couple of days. I’ve been to the canyon before, but never hiked it. Of course this is the hottest time of year to be there, so I’m taking as little as possible weight wise, but am still potentially overloaded. It’s the small things that count: glasses, binoculars, ear plugs, towel, gloves, utensils, toilet paper, thermometer, camera, tripod, space blanket, headlamp, matches, safety pins, clothes pins, mirror, moleskin, foot powder, etc. I’ve been reading a lot about the canyon. The history is pretty interesting, but the feeling I get is that when all’s said and done the canyon’s the canyon and what anyone says about it doesn't matter a hoot. It's only when you're in it that you're in it.

In the early part of the last century there was a guy named James T. Owens who was appointed game warden of the North Rim by rough and ready Teddy Roosevelt. Uncle Jimmy, as he was fondly called, was known for his skill in killing mountain lions and other predators—wolves, coyotes, etc. The big guns were trying to set up a hunting preserve out there, and the feeling was that the fewer predators you had, the more game would be available for hunting. Jimmy claimed that he and his dogs killed 532 cougars. That's right--532, although some believe he killed more than a thousand. Their skins covered his walls; he drove their claws into trees and into the siding of his house to show them off. He was much admired. Trouble was that once the cats and wolves were gone, the deer bred like rabbits. They ate everything green on the North Rim, and the population soared from 4000 to 100,000. Eventually they starved to death in droves, an ecological disaster and an early lesson in "wildlife management."

The thing I find interesting about all this is that a man actually had the will and desire to destroy 532 wild souls like that. Not for food, not for protection--just to kill them. These individuals were there long before Jimmy, minding their own business. It seems to me that violence like this against innocents leaves a man at the bottom of the barrel in the karma department. How do you look yourself in the mirror when you kill like that? But Uncle Jimmy Owens lived to be an old man, happy and venerated, making me wonder whether karma's a ruse. As someone wrote to me last week: "you can do whatever the hell you please, just so long as you can deal with the consequences." My guess is that Jimmy felt fine about it all, and life--his, anyway--was fine and good.

Homeplace

By Jo MacDougall

Awake while you sleep,
I tie and untie the strings of what went wrong:
the farm auctioned, my father buried in Minnesota,
you and I alone
in a rented room.

I remember my father when I was six
pushing open a gate on the farm road,
stirring the dust of August.
The locusts sizzling in the grass,
a hum of dragonflies hanging sleepy above us.


Barn: Maine USA. June 2007.

Mariapresbyteriana

NYC. April 2008.

Goose Rocks Sunset

Goose Rocks, Maine. July, 2007.

Luna Madrileña

Madrid, España. June 2007.

"Enjoy Responsibly."

Back cover ad from Paste, a pop music mag for teens and 20-somethings.

un monde perdu

Whilst walking in the woods one gray day—a deep woods with a heavy deciduous canopy, carpeted with nearly impregnable vancis priet and wilted duck thorn, the sharp odor of rockthrip unholy and pervasive in my whiskey blistered frappe-nasáal, a woods which men of statures superior even to mine own would happily avoid—I came upon a tethered white balloon, abandoned there like some apostolic schnelkuhn. I marveled at its immaculate condition, its ivory vrit-comun, and its lengthy entang stupís, all of it superficially unscathed. Oh! the chills that coursed through my copage-dit as I pondered the tantalizing enigma of its journey: whence it had come, and whither lay its ultimate becaz. I might mention too that it was raining—just a drizz, you see, but enough to elicit in me a sense of the object’s inner schtreck, its badréz bassó, if you will, perhaps born of falling, perhaps born of its loathsome return to earth after the joie fauntille of riding the clitorum punctus of helium-inspired buoyánce. I thought (profoundly, of course): Is not this viz miraculoze before me actually each of us in body and in spirit: aloft and flying fancy-free one moment, then, in a wink, earth-bound hausnegers-cum-dongknockers to the Fud Lugubrioso the next? I made up my mind to liberate that erstwhile sidekick of the untamed, unbridled Zefuros (Toots Reydevents himself), and did what had to be done: I slid my Swiss slicér aguté from my còrduroys, severed the insufferable twit de bondage (in one stroke imbuing it with all the pudgéé of recalcitrant metaphor), and gave out with an emphatic “Huzzah!” so as to urge the nascent aeronaut aloft. Alas, that dim bag went nowhere. It simply hung lethargically in the oppressive air, indifferent to the idea of flight. Out of gas, the fragile luftflutta had lost its espirit cockoso. So I did the only humane thing left. I murdered it. In a single, well-aimed espadanza vireé, I ran it through with seven grams of stainless steel. And I shuttered at its last gasp: an anemic pop that resounded weakly through the woodland, a sound reminiscent of an aging cudge-rouge self-destructing in its obscene orgasmulosco finalto. I turned then and retraced my steps, leaving the limp rubber carcass drooping from a lentine poplar branch, abandoned forever in the fundo erasmo of that dismal Arschlochwelt. By the time I reached my car I was sobbing. I poured myself a stiff Schlopzein from the ancient Persian donku in the glove box and drove home, drunk and teary-eyed, yet despairing not a whit for the carnage plastique of this unhappy, unpredictable monde perdu.
Pic: The White Balloon. Maine USA. April, 2008.

Chop-Chop

Ax murder: December, 2007.

Thanks for the Memory

Don't Worry, Be Happy

It Bores & Burrows in the Skullbone

The Fud Lugubrioso

Well, what do you want for Big Chuck's first video effort? Does it not evoke a twinge of the teary dismal. Of the fud lugubrioso? Of the wet and wanton? No? Well then, can we not at least expect improvement?

Vid: Rain on vernal pool. Maine, USA. April, 2008

Note to Self

~~~
calm down
what you think is coming
isn’t coming
relax
what you think you need
you don’t need
sit still
what you think you want
you don’t need
look around
everything you need
is right in front of you
and no one is trying
to take it away from you
~~~

Photo: Exploding star. June 2004.

Escalator Surprise

Women on an escalator: NY, NY. USA. April 2008.

Happy Legs

Happy Legs: NY, NY. USA. April 2008.

Triptych: Whistling Back the Bowwows

Movie poster: NY, NY. USA. February 2007.
News clipping: found among my deceased uncle's few worldly possessions. February 1998.
TV image: January 2005.

Signs of the Times