“I’m starving,” Donna’s text read. Translation: “let’s go to the greatest Thai place in the world tonight.” She was at yoga, but her mind was on delicious things, like spicy tuna, coconut soup, and Mark the waiter. I would be lying if I didn’t say that I had other things on my mind as well. Delilah the owner was there at lunch yesterday, and I asked her if she wanted to join me. She grabbed a bowl of soup and did. We had a lovely conversation about education, parents, and travel. She grew up in Bangkok but had lived in California for most of her life. She’s a traveler and had some great stories. One in particular is worth retelling for all those out there who wish to be up and gone in a moment’s notice. It seems that the restaurant ran out of bok choy, so she told everyone she was going to pick some up. She went to LA, got on a plane, and flew to San Francisco, spent three days there, then returned with the bok choy. Awesome.

So Donna came by around eight, changed out of her yoga clothes, put on her peasant blouse and boots, and we were off. On the lookout for death in the form of Coolville cop cars, we crossed the streets carefully and anticipated our feast and seeing our friends who work there. Sure enough, Mark was our waiter, and Donna beamed like a little girl. Delilah also came by to say hello and was stunning in her long, black dress. It was going to be a good night.

Donna ordered spicy tuna, and I had the coconut soup. Donna’s hands were so cold she wore her REI gloves to drink her wine. Sophisticated woman, my friend Donna. Mark came by to check on us Donna often, and she and I had our usual good conversation that ranged from work to love to travel. The place was packed when we arrived, but as we lingered over my favorite Pinot Noir, tables emptied and the atmosphere changed to late-night, wine-inspired ruminations. Delilah relaxed at the table behind us with four of her beautiful friends, Mark made his rounds but came by more often to chat, and Donna and I sat back in our chairs and reflected on her love life.

Just as things were winding down, Fyodor called from New York. He had just left a party for Woody Harrelson’s new film, and Woody was in attendance, but now Fyodor was wondering the streets of Manhattan, lost again. “Dude, where am I?” he asks me without saying hello. It’s a rhetorical question, even an existential one, and I love imagining him drunk and lost trying to make his way to the subway and to his fabulous apartment overlooking the Statue of Liberty. “Brother!” I say, “where art thou?” Fyodor and I could have entire conversations using only lines from film and literature. Vivien told us once that this is a gendered form of communication, that women don’t quote movie lines to each other. She’s right, I think, as she often is. Fyodor then offers his usual greeting, “Dude, what are you doing?” When I tell him, he offers his usual response: “What?” I hear New York traffic in the background and try to imagine my best friend stumbling through those mean streets, holding his pathetic non-iPhone to his ear, dodging traffic, bellowing his belly-laugh into the concrete canyons.

“I’m having dinner with Donna,” I say to him again. He asks what we are eating. “Spicy tuna and coconut soup,” I tell him, knowing that he doesn’t care. That very morning he had called me on his way to work, so it was like 3:00 am for me, and I happened to be up. His question was “What’s the weather?” I cursed him out for that one. When he finally realizes I am having dinner with Donna, he asks to speak with her. She smiles her lovely smile and asks what he doing, then I hear her say “spicy tuna and coconut soup.” She looks at me, laughing, because she has heard me say the same thing. They talk for a while, then she hands the phone back to me. “Dude, I’m lost and drunk.” “You have no idea on how many levels that is true my friend,” I tell him. His laughter bounces off the skyscrapers. We speak of other things for a while, and now the remaining people in the restaurant are stealing glances at Donna and me like we are speaking to some kind of celebrity, and in some ways we are. Fyodor asks me again what we had for dinner: “spicy tuna and coconut soup,” I say again, and Donna joins me in the laughter.

“Let me talk to Donna again,” he says, and I hand her the phone and hear her say “spicy tuna and coconut soup.” We laugh like the children we are on this night. Mark comes by ostensibly to check on us but really I think to see what’s up. Mark knows Fyodor too, having taken his class on Tolkien at Cool University, and he asks if he can speak to him. I look at Donna, laugh, and give Mark the phone. Mark is an excellent conversationalist, able to engage anyone on most any level, and he begins by asking how Fyodor is faring in Gotham. Of course Mark gets cut off half-way through his kind inquiry, and Donna and I watch as his face turns quizzical. He then says “spicy tuna and coconut soup.” Now three people are laughing hysterically and loudly in the small space that was only a little while before quiet and contemplative. Mark takes the phone over to a table and sits down to talk to Fyodor.

Now Delilah asks me who Mark is talking to. “That’s my friend in New York,” I tell her. “He’s drunk and lost in Manhattan, trying to find his way home.” She looks at me quizzically as well, as do her beautiful friends. “It’s a little ritual we have,” I explain, “he calls me when he lost, and I talk him home.” Trying to understand, she asks “So where is he now?” “Hell if I know,” I say, and now their table erupts in laughter. Mark hands the phone back to me, and I hear “Dude, what are you doing?” and we go through the whole thing again. Again, he says, “Let me talk to Donna.” As they talk, and I hear the now familiar refrain of “spicy tuna and coconut soup,” Mark asks if Donna and I want to get a drink after at the martini bar next door. I tell him no because I was up at 3:00 am talking about the weather. Donna makes a face at me that I don’t understand.

We finally leave the restaurant and walk home, but Fyodor remains on the line talking to both of us. We walk into my house still talking to him, but this doesn’t stop Donna from chastising me for turning Mark down for a drink. “I think he and Delilah want to hang out with us, maybe even swing with us,” she says excitedly. She has mentioned this before, and I fear that she may be right. I have missed our chance to have a foursome. The stereotypes of California are there for a reason. I had not been here a month before I was invited to join a colleague and her husband in a sordid triangle, and there have been other opportunities I have passed up. When I spoke last with St. Mary of New York and told her of recent events here, she asked me if I had seen Californication. I have, in fact, been watching the series with great interest. Like all good art, it takes what’s real and enhances it, and California culture is its own reality. I tell Donna that I’m too tired for a foursome and that she should go back and make it a threesome or a twosome. Besides, I wanted to watch more Californication. Better to live that life vicariously through the moody Hank Moody.

Donna goes home, and I keep talking to Fyodor. He is now standing outside his building in the rain, soaked, and holding a plastic bag that contains, among other things, an umbrella that he has not opened all night. The irony is not lost on him, and it moves him into a self-reflective discourse that is so deep and powerful, it quiets me. My best friend lives large and well, but like all of us, he is broken and damaged, and I love him very much. For once, I have no words for him, no movie lines, no Walt Whitman. All I can say is “I know, Fyodor, I know.” There is a long silence, made longer by its contrast to the loud laughter earlier in the evening, and two friends on separate coasts sit in the darkness and contemplate their miraculous journeys, the damage and the glory, the pain and the pleasure, and the beautiful fragments among the ruins. Fyodor then breaks the silence by saying with all sincerity: “Hey, what did you and Donna have for dinner?” Instead of laughing now, I smile quietly, warmed by the magic of words and memory and say “spicy tuna and coconut soup and it was delicious.”

I do my ten-mile walk every other day now. It has become a sacred three hours where I have bouts of reverie mixed with introspection. Often, I find myself tremendously joyful as I walk along the ridge overlooking orange groves, and more than once I have seen a hawk at those times.

I have found a way up to Sunset Drive that avoids the major roads and in fact cuts through a Coolville historical landmark. At the bottom of the hill leading up to the landmark, I had seen three older gentlemen sitting on the concrete marker on numerous occasions. At first I thought they were senior citizens who were waiting for their bus to pick them up, but then I kept seeing them and realized that they were probably just hanging out. I began to wave to them as I passed and thought that soon enough we would have a conversation. That conversation was yesterday.

I had to wait for traffic to clear before I could cross over to them, and I could see that they were arming themselves with questions for me. Sure enough they stopped me as I passed and began the questioning: “How are your knees? Do you have good shoes? It looks like you’re a little stiff.” I answered, “Well, yes, my right knee does hurt a bit when—” but I was cut off. “My knee kills me. You see I had this injury in the war, and . . .” Right. This wasn’t going to be about me; it rarely is with older people, but that’s okay. I thought they would have good stories, and they did.

Chuck had on a University of New Mexico sweatshirt and was the most dignified of all three. I liked him immediately. Charles was clearly the oldest, and he dressed like it. It was Ernie who had begun the questioning as a way of telling me about his knees, and I looked into his dark glasses to see if I could see his eyes. We had good-natured banter for about fifteen minutes, if you can call me not getting to say much banter. Clearly, they waited on their perch there to swoop down on passers-by who would listen to them even for a moment. In the few minutes we spoke, I learned that Ernie’s wife is dying of cancer, that Chuck asks him about her every day, that that makes Ernie love Chuck, that Ernie wanted to be a priest but had to join the Army to take care of his mother, that all three were veterans (WWII, Korea, Vietnam), that Charles kept his teeth in his pocket most of the time (Ernie squeezed them to prove it), that Chuck was a professor of physiology, and that they all three were best friends and loved life. At one point Ernie pulled me to him and insisted that I listen. He said, “Jobs come and go. What matters is life: family, friends, living. Don’t ever let a job or a career determine your life. Live!” I was taken aback by this prophet’s sincerity and earnestness. Finally, I was able to speak, “As a matter of fact,” I began, but I was soon cut off by the next lesson. It was Chuck espousing something less earnest and less grand. In the middle of his sermon, a bird shat on his head.

I began laughing as Chuck tried to clean off his head, confused as to what had happened. “I’m sorry Chuck,” I said between my chuckles, “but a bird shat on your head.” Charles and Ernie looked at him and me with disbelief, then broke into laughter when my observation was confirmed. “Well,” Chuck said, searching for the words, “I don’t know what to say about that.” “I think the bird said it for you,” I replied. We all laughed again, and I told them I had to continue my walk, but I wished them good will and planned on talking again. They said goodbye several times each and tried to keep me, but I had joy to find on the ridge. We all shook hands a bade each other a hearty farewell. I look forward to seeing them tomorrow and hearing more stories.

As I walked up the hill, I thought of Ernie’s earnest exhortation to me about the importance of life over a career. It resonated with everything I have been thinking of late, and Ernie seemed to be onto something, as most prophets do. It was then that I thought of Tiresias from The Odyssey, the blind prophet who advises Odysseus so well from the underworld. And I remembered I never did see Ernie’s eyes.

We had not seen each other since our post-Halloween analysis/walk, so Donna and I met up for dinner at the best Thai place in the world, site of the sketchy Halloween party. We walked down from my place and picked up our conversation, like we always do, with ease and good will. Dinner was lovely, and our waiter, who was dressed as Bruno for the party, came over and thanked us for coming. I should say he thanked Donna for coming because I don’t think he knows who I am still. He complimented Donna on her outfit and pointed out that she was in the video posted on their Facebook site. He then turned to me to compliment me on my James Bond costume. Donna and I looked at each other and tried not to laugh. I think he was thinking of another guy there who was in a tuxedo. I can understand his confusion: it’s hard to tell a suave, handsome, debonair secret agent from a middle-aged, literature-professor, blogging beeyatch.

Walking home, Donna was in the throes of a diatribe on the harm done to us all by the seasonal time change. She is angry that she gets home and doesn’t have time to let her cats outside before it gets dark (darkness=coyotes=death in Coolville). I didn’t have the heart to tell her that actually we had just ended Daylight Savings Time, and actually we were now in standard time, so what she was really arguing for was a kind of permanent Daylight Savings Time, which kind of went against her whole point of messing with time. She was just so into it I didn’t want to stop her. At the corner where the Coolville Police Department resides, we began crossing with the light in the crosswalk when a Coolville Police SUV came barreling from the opposite direction making a left turn into our crosswalk. He projected his Urban Assault Vehicle right into the crosswalk like a bullet. Donna was like a squirrel crossing the road: she dropped her nuts, squealed, and ran back to the curb. I, on the other hand, stood my ground until the clueless cop swerved slightly and screeched to a stop about a foot from me. Donna says that it was six inches, but she was rather far away, having left me to die at the hands of Coolville PD. He had his window down, but I could have seen him regardless because his face looked like the moon in the dead of night. I simply took my hands out of my pockets (yes, I know) and gave him the New York shrug that says wtf? Had I been quicker on the draw, I would have conjured Ratso Rizzo and yelled “I’m walkin’ here; I’m walkin’ here.” Mumbling like the perp that he was, he says something like “I’m sorry. I was watching that guy.” He nods to the pedestrian who was crossing the other way, a man of Asian descent who looked confused and slightly afraid. The cop made it sound like he was going to cut this guy off and arrest him or some other macho bullshit. But he knew he was made, and I turned back at him and gave him my prison stare. After leaving my arms in the wtf? position for a moment, I shook my head, and kept walking.

Now Donna is like “WTF? Aristaeus?!!!!! Do you want to die? You talk about dying on a walk, but you taunt death in a cross-walk next to the Coolville Police Station?” I am almost as stunned by her response as I am the near-death experience I have just had. She’s upset. I want to say “you dropped your nuts, little squirrel,” but I fear for my life. Now she can’t stop talking about what just happened. I think about saying “Screw Daylight Savings Time” to get her off the subject, but that’s not going to happen no matter what I say. Bella Donna is processing all this and goes from anger (“Are you taunting death?”) to confusion (“Why didn’t you move?”) to embarrassment (“I left you, didn’t I?”) to laughter (“Did you see the cop’s face?”). We talk all the way home, and she makes a point to come in and tell Robby that we almost died. What do you mean “we” white woman?

As she passes through her states of emotion, I seriously consider her point. Why didn’t I react? First of all, I know I wasn’t frozen up. I was processing at some level. Somewhere I recognized that it was a police car, and I think I also recognized we were near a police station. For reasons that I cannot explain here, the Coolville Police Station at that location will always bring back memories for me, and I never pass it without recalling them. Also, I think I knew that I still had time to jump back or even up to avoid or soften the impact. Maybe I just wanted to be James Bond and be cool at all times. I remember literally stopping a taxi in Istanbul because he was trying to push me out of the way in that insane, wonderful way drivers have there. I simply stood in front of him with my hands on his hood to let him know it wasn’t going to happen. I think he even nodded at me as if to say he understood I was not going to be bullied.

Donna’s reaction and words did give me pause, and I’ve been thinking about them ever since. Why didn’t I jump back or drop my nuts and run like Donna? I think it’s a combination of two things. First, I’m really good at reading traffic and projecting what will happen in time. Living in Atlanta and Boston and driving in London, Los Angeles, and San Francisco have given me some skills in that regard, and I trust my instincts. Secondly, and related to the first, I’m not afraid of much. I can hear Dwight Yoakum’s creepy voice in my head as Doyle Hargraves in Sling Blade saying “I ain’t skeered of shit.” Well, I ain’t. There’s a confidence that comes from surviving severe loss that permeates your life and applies to nearly everything. I really ain’t skeered of shit, and while I am not reckless, I’m also not going to be afraid of life. Accordingly, I’ve roamed the streets of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Memphis, London, Budapest, Berlin, Istanbul and others late at night and in some sketchy places, not to test fate but also not to fear. Maybe I’m making too much of all this, but if I am, it’s Donna’s fault. Donna the squirrel.

We did laugh at the cop. I don’t have much of a problem with cops in general, but I have major problems with Coolville cops. On a good day, they’re idiots; on a bad day, they’re criminally idiotic. I tell Donna that if I had been hit and survived, I would sue and own the city of Coolville. If I did, I would appoint Mathias, a six-foot-two, two-hundred-fifty pound, tattooed and pierced, Finnish, evangelical Christian, as my chief of police. I suppose I could still sue the city of Coolville for this assault without battery by an idiot with a badge, but in the end he’s just a guy who made a mistake and fortunately nothing bad happened other than Donna dropped her nuts. I will, therefore, not sue them. So to all you Coolville cops out there: you’re assholes and you’re welcome.

I do not know which to prefer
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”

Santa Barbara is everything you think of when you think of the California myth: mountains, beaches, lattes, and beautiful people everywhere. I had passed through it several times on my various trips up and down the PCH, but I had never lingered there until I drove over for a job interview in September. While my interview was just a few hours in the middle of the day, I took the opportunity to explore the city a bit and drove over the night before. It was beautiful. Tree lined streets downtown framed chic stores, coffee shops, and theaters. Quaint bungalows and ranch houses dotted the slopes of the mountains above, and the town came right to the ocean where there was a gorgeous park. About eighty-thousand souls populate the town, which has elements of idyllic village life while also being only an hour or so from Los Angeles. North of Santa Barbara begins the scenic portion of the PCH. It is really a perfect town: progressive, beautiful, serene, and alive, all at the same time.

Earlier this week I was invited back for a second interview. I thought I would be. I’m not being egotistical; I just know higher education very well, and I knew I was perfect for this position. That doesn’t mean I will get the job because getting the offer isn’t about being the ideal candidate; it’s about the accumulated balance between your being threatening and being promising for each member of the search committee and for the administration. Be too amazing, and you’ll certainly not get the job because someone there will see you as supplanting them as the amazing person. Be less than amazing, and you will certainly not get the job because many people there will see you as not being cool enough to hang out with them and therefore diminishing the reputation of the university (read: diminishing their own reputation). It’s a difficult and ultimately impossible line to tow, and often the best people do not get the job because of these issues.

The real talent is being able to be amazing to the people who want you to be amazing and being humble and accommodating to the people who see you as a potential threat. It’s taken me a long time to figure that out, but I can do it now with my eyes closed. For example, the person currently in the position is retiring, a genial and gracious man who just wants to write and think. He became a teacher because he loves ideas but he has spent the last years of his job immersed in administrivia. He is worn down, defeated, sad, and lonely. He offered to take me to lunch, so I ask him about his plans for retirement. Three hours later, I have heard them all and more. He was in desperate need of someone to talk to, and I provided that for him. Another example: two women in my presentation sit perched in their chairs squinting their eyes at me the entire time. They are sizing me up. They want me to say something to affirm them. During the question and answer session, the younger of them asks me a question about writing standards while the older woman nods her head without realizing she is doing so. This is clearly their issue. They have talked about it at length, complained about it to the man in the position now and perhaps others above him, and see this issue as definitive for their jobs, mine, and the university. I answer with the standard speech about the importance of writing, my experience as a director of writing at another university, and some writing stories from my classes. I am careful to pepper my remarks with references to stylistic conventions (periods and commas go inside quotation marks, colons and semicolons go outside), which is what they really want to hear. They want to know that I am in their club. That I will wage war on comma splices and pronoun-verb disagreements and the students who propagate them. That I will bewail the decline of grammar with them and see it as a sign of the apocalypse that only we, the true believers, can avert with our copies of Strunk and White and the MLA Handbook as our crests. At the end of my answer, they look at each other knowingly and nod slightly. I am in.

I did not mean to learn all this, and I am a bit embarrassed to share it with you here. It seems disingenuous, and I guess it is, but every job interview is disingenuous. At least I told them in the presentation that the person I am on Facebook is not the person who is in front of them at that moment, and I meant it truly. But even that remark will be interpreted as being either too provocative and playful or wonderfully provocative and playful, depending on my threat level. I mentioned blogging as a genre in my lunch meeting, and the gentleman who has the position now even asked if he could read this blog. I told him no. They don’t get to see Aristaeus; only a few people do.

It was during that three-hour lunch that I decided I will not take this job. It will probably be offered to me. The job is nearly an ideal fit on paper, and Santa Barbara is almost too perfect. Nearly. Almost. Here’s the thing: I do not want to work anymore. I am on leave this semester, and I find it so freeing that I do not think I can go back to renting my talents and thoughts to an institution that is simply going to use them as fuel for the machine, and all institutions are going to do that in some way. There are sacred moments in the classroom, the community, and even in administration. It can happen. But the cost is too great. The cost is my very soul. The kind gentleman who regaled me with stories of his life and work for three hours did so because he found someone he could talk to—finally. A perfect stranger with whom he felt an opening to convey his cherished memories and dreams, a stranger because there was no one and (more importantly) no place at his institution for this conversation. He planned to write a book about a certain aspect of religion and wanted to know if I knew of any texts he should consult. I gave him some, but when I asked him why he wanted to write such a book, he said “To leave something behind.” Sadness washed over me in waves, and I tried not to let him see. He was seventy, and he had spent his life—literally spent it—in an institution. He was out of time and energy, empty, waiting to begin living at seventy. And even then what he wanted was for someone to recognize his work, “to leave something behind,” which was in his case a book on religion that maybe three people in the world would read, then dismiss in favor of their own theory of whatever. He later wrote me to apologize for unloading all his hopes and dreams (and regrets) on me, an interloper who was there to take his job. I am not criticizing him as much as lamenting him. Most people do it his way: work then live. The old saw about living to work versus working to live is, like all clichés. true in some sense. He is a good man, living a good life, doing good work, and I refuse to be him.

I stayed that evening as well and looked forward to wandering the streets of Santa Barbara. Initially, I had thought of staying to see if it is a city that I want to be my home. Now, it is just another city I will explore for a time, then move on. This is good. It takes the weight of expectations off the city and off of me. I am free to explore. First stop is the Palace Grill for dinner. Cajun food in California. I am excited because Cajun food is heavenly, and the restaurant has great reviews. I am seated and order a Syrah. While I sip, I read the menu like a novel. There is so much goodness here I don’t know where to start or to end. I know that I will have the bread pudding because that is New Orleans’ greatest gift to the world. I settle on the crawfish étouffée, despite the gentleman next to me suggesting the steak stuffed with crawfish. It is a wise choice and a beautiful thing in this world. It also works well with the Syrah, and I am extremely happy. I text Vivien, Mary, Celeste, and Kassie to tell them I am having crawfish étouffée. They don’t care. I look around at people enjoying their food and their lives because this food is making their lives quite fine at the moment, as it is mine. The bread pudding is sublime, true New Orleans with whiskey sauce. Life is indeed sweet. I need some music and conversation.

Yelp tells me that the best music venue in Santa Barbara is Velvet Jones, and I walk out into the cool night air and make my way down State street. Fog has rolled in, and it changes the night into something different—close, even cloying, on the edge of ominous and hopeful. I like it very much, and I like my free self wandering the streets of this city that I will never be a citizen of. Things are very quiet, quieter because of the fog. I see Velvet Jones and walk up to the door. Locked. I pull again. Locked. A sign. Disappointed, I move down the sidewalk looking and listening for other activity. There is almost none, but I still like walking through the fog, anonymous and free.

I pass by a bar that has some activity, men playing darts and a few people at the bar. I look up at the sign: The James Joyce. Now we’re talking. Happy now, I go inside and order a Guinness. I am in The James Joyce drinking a Guinness. There’s only one thing missing. I download Ulysses on my iPhone and begin reading the first chapter, Buck Mulligan tormenting Stephan Daedalus with his blasphemies and social offenses. I keep waiting for someone to ask me what I’m doing, and I will ask them what they think the lamest thing I could be doing is. Then I will tell them: reading Ulysses in The James Joyce while drinking a Guinness. No one asks. No one even notices. I begin to hear the conversations of the two women next to me, twenty-somethings with whom I usually have a lot in common. Not these two. They are complaining about their lives, and their complaints are parochial and lame. They remind me of my lunch with the man who complained about his life. Screw Joyce. What these people need is Whitman: “I am he who tauntingly compels men, women, nations,/Crying, Leap from your seats, and contend for your lives!” But there is no contending in Santa Barbara tonight, nothing to contend, no life to contend for. I leave without finishing my beer.

My last hope is the waterfront. Surely, something is happening there. But there is only darkness and fog—and me. And it all comes down to me. Emerson: “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” I do trust myself, my instincts and intuitions, my words and my deeds. In that trust is freedom, and it’s more than just another word for nothing left to lose. It’s real and ultimately all we have or need. I smile as Penelope and I trace our way back to the modest hotel. This will be my last night in Santa Barbara for a while, and I won’t be living here, but I will be living.

It was Halloween. It was weird. The day after, Donna and I did our walk and interpreted the events of the day. It was she who used the metaphor of the mask to understand it all. She was on fire that day.

First of all, for some reason Robby decided we had to have an Irish dinner. On Halloween. The connection remained obscure, as did the nature of the thing. I wasn’t sure what an Irish dinner was, but it had to involve potatoes and Guinness, and I love both, so how bad could it be?

After dinner the other night at the Thai place, Donna and I were invited to their Halloween Party . Well, it’s not like we were special; everyone was invited, but we told people we were invited, like we were special. We kind of looked at each other and nodded. as if to say “sure, sounds like fun” to the manager and “yeah, right” to ourselves. We still weren’t sure we would go, or I thought we weren’t, then Donna texts me and asks if I have any handcuffs, real ones, not those silly fake ones. But here it was, Halloween, and Donna is wanting handcuffs, the real ones. Apparently, she had found some black leather pants with chains in Colorado and wanted to wear them. Robby and I were to go to the party as her beeyatches. When I told Fyodor on the phone what I was going as, he said “Oh, so you’ll just act the way you usually do and wear your usual clothes then.” Asshole. But that’s exactly what I did.

So Robby and I go to the grocery store, carrying with us a recipe he has printed out from Epicurious.com, and I’ve never seen him this way. He is in a world of his own, talking to himself, and looking around for shitake mushrooms and sixteen green beans. I don’t know why it had to be sixteen, but it did, and I was not to question why, mine was just to drive and buy. We wander around the local trés chic grocery picking up such odds and ends, and I just try to stay out of the way. We find a one-cent wine sale (buy one, the second is one cent) going on and grab a couple of Pinot’s for dinner, as any good Irishman would, along with the requisite six of Guinness. This could be good. This could be bad.

Once home, Robby takes over my kitchen, having brought some pots and pans himself to compensate for my culinary disabilities. He is in the zone, spreading out the ingredients and pots and pans and talking to himself still. Wanting to give the artist his space, I go outside to talk to my son Lukas. We have one of our great talks about life, love, women, and work, and all is most well. I also talk to Fyodor in New York who is wandering around Times Square looking for a club where there’s a metal band. He often calls me in New York while he’s wandering, and sometimes he asks me to look up where he is and where he is supposed to go. I find this weird and wonderful and am happy to oblige by directing him to the various venues of his new New York life. The last time it was to find Cornel West in Columbus Circle, tonight a metal band in Times Square. He also provides a running commentary on the women around him on the subways and sidewalks: “I would marry her tomorrow,” says my never-married friend about a woman he has just seen for the first time, and I believe he would. When I was there with him this summer, he did the same thing on the subway, only the woman was with what looked like a boyfriend. As we sat across from each other on the subway, the only ones in the car, I could almost see the electricity between them. Just before the Battery Park stop, he looked at me and said “I would marry her tomorrow.” When we all got up to leave, she spoke to her boyfriend, who turned around and looked directly at me, like he would kill me. Life with Fyodor is always interesting and a little dangerous at times.

I consider asking Robby if we should invite some other people over, such as Kassey or Celeste, since they’ve been hanging out some of late, or even Donna, since she’s coming over later anyway. But I don’t want to interrupt his flow, and he is flowing like Heraclitus’ river that we cannot step into twice. Finally, he finishes, and we sit down to eat on my patio. it is amazing, wonderful, delicious, sublime. One of the wonderful things about southern California is that you can always eat outside any time of year with good weather and no bugs. In fact, my dining room table is outside on my patio because that’s just where it should be. We ooh and aah over the meal: steaks, champ, vegetables, bread, wine, Guinness. I see Robby texting someone, and sure enough it is Kassey. Then he says something about where Donna is. Donna tells me on our walk that she wondered why she wasn’t invited, then deduces that Robby probably wanted to make sure the meal was awesome before he had anyone over.

As we finish up our fantastic Irish dinner, Donna makes her way over around 8:30, and she’s wearing her new pants. We learn that she rode her bike here with those pants, which gives us pause. They are indeed black and have chains on them, and she’s wearing boots that are meant to inflict pain. “Take my coat beeyatch,” she says unconvincingly, and she will do this all night. Donna is sweet and kind, and even when she calls me beeyatch, she does it with a smile. We cannot let the food go and keep nibbling until 10, when the party begins. Wisely, we walk from my house to the bar, considering for a moment having Donna use dog leashes on Robby and me, but we decide in the end that we both look beeyatchy enough in our sport coats and oxford shirts.

At the restaurant, we are treated to a classic southern California event. There is enough silicone, botox ,and collagen to pave a new HOV lane to Los Angeles. I order some vodka shots, and the owner, who is stunning in her black miniskirt and blond wig, gives them to me for free. Meanwhile, Donna has someone give her a martini. They just give it to her. Maybe it is the pants. Or the long, black wig, or the black lipstick, or the fake pirate tatoo. No, it’s just Donna. She’s an attractive woman in her early thirties who is incredibly fit, and this stuff happens to her all the time. She also, of course, worries about her ass, so I kid her about it unmercifully because there is nothing to kid about. Once when I was in LA, I called her and said “I can see your ass from here.” She was not amused.

The party is surreal, even for Halloween, and the vibe is just very strange. The people, a collection of masks, are even more unreal than they should be on Halloween. I’m not sure they’re human. Seriously. There’s just a vapidity here that is odd and discomfiting. Robby and I decide we are done with this scene and make our way to the sidewalk. There we see Donna who is texting a friend to say that she is at a surreal party. We agree that it is time to try another bar and happily leave behind the jiggling silicone mass.

We consider the college bar, but I’ve never liked it, and there’s a line to get in. I announce that I’m not standing in a f**&ing line for the f*^&ing college bar and walk toward the cool bar, Beneath the Ground. It was here that Vivien’s father and I did the karaoke version of “Sweet Home Alabama,” here where I would have had my first date in Coolville had I understood that the iPhone requires you to touch both “save” and “done” when entering a number (I never saw her again), here where Mathias kept bringing me Jim Beams neat using my credit card while I hit on his girlfriend without knowing it was his girlfriend. It was almost like coming home.

Donna, Robby, and I walk in, the dark Dorothy and her beeyatches. I order vodka-tonic while they find a table.  We look around and see the masks, but there are real people behind these masks. They are singing and dancing, enjoying the revelry of the place and the occasion. I go to look for the karaoke book and seeing it lying on a nearby table. A woman there says “hey there.” “Hey there,” I reply, not knowing who she is. “I’m the bartender at Casa Guatemala.” Now I remember her. How could I not? She’s served me gallons of margaritas, but now she’s a vampire. Does she know I’m The Slayer.

We speak for a moment, then she introduces me to her friend, Lisa, who supposedly works at Cool University. We are sitting right next to the speakers, so it’s a bit difficult to hear, but we immediately strike up a very intense and flirty conversation. Because we can’t hear, we have to put our mouths next to each other’s ears in that wonderful, practical, and semi-erotic way that conversations happen in loud bars. Very quickly, she’s doing the touching hands thing. Very quickly, she’s doing the hair-flip thing. Hmmmm.

I should point out that I’m not a player. I’m no Fyodor, who is like Casanova on speed. Seriously, I’m just enjoying the conversation, the energy of it, and how quickly two people can become, on the surface at least, somewhat intimate—in a karaoke bar—on Halloween—while I’m being someone else’s beeyatch. I don’t think much about all this until I turn to look for Donna and Robby, who are sitting at the table shaking their heads at me. Honestly, I couldn’t tell you whether Lisa was attractive or not, only that we had great energy in our conversation, but you probably don’t believe me. She did, however, smell very good.

This ear-talk, hand-touch, hair-flip thing goes on for some time. After a while I turn to look for my friends and see that Donna is surrounded by the Tin Man and Willy Wonka, and the Road Warrior is lurking nearby looking ominous. I laugh out loud at how easy it is for women like Donna, and how hard it is for men like me and Robby. But I look around and Robby is sitting with two women at a table all to themselves, and I laugh out loud again. In addition to Lisa and Monica at my table, there is Susan and Wonder Woman. We are all doing pretty well, I guess, if appearances count for anything. Of course, all that was to change.

Lisa disappears with some of the other women at the table, in that unspoken, feminine agreement that they will disappear and analyze things just as they are getting interesting. I am left with Wonder Woman. “What’s her name again?” I ask Wonder Woman, referring to the woman whose ear I have been speaking into for the last hour or so. “Lisa,” she shouts over the music. “I would marry her tomorrow,” I tell Wonder Woman, trying out Fyodor’s line. Wonder Woman replies, “She’s married. In fact she has an eight-month old daughter.” I smile in recognition of masks and fate and say “Of course she does.” She continues, “Now Susan is a doctor, a vet, and she’s single.” Right. And she hasn’t even so much as looked at me the whole time I’m sitting at her table. Monica comes back and sits on my lap. I don’t know why she does or what to do about it. Eventually, she leaves, and Robby joins our table.

Robby and Lisa get into an argument because Lisa knows Robby’s sisters and makes an disparaging remark about them. Things are beginning to spin out of control. Donna comes over to meet Lisa. She tells me on our walk the next day that she could tell she was a beeyatch the moment she met her and asks me why I go straight for the beeyatch when there are all kinds of women around. I have no answer for her. Robby’s name is called to sing the last song of the evening, and it is last call. The song is, appropriately enough, “The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down.” After he finishes, Wonder Woman and her cohort get up to leave. Lisa puts on a white, faux rabbit coat. I keep touching it for some reason. Maybe I can’t believe that a woman who smells that good and has such nice ears would wear such a thing, but like everything else tonight, it too is a mask. As we begin to go up the stairs, Lisa turns to me and says, “I’m sorry Aristaeus. It’s just not going to happen.” I laugh out loud because I don’t even know what “it” was, but I knew “it” wasn’t going to happen as soon as I learned there was a husband and child involved.

We walk home, like three refugees, dazed, drunk, and confused. We wear the mask. Robby is still angry at Lisa for the comment about his sisters and hurls curses at her into the empty night. We wear the mask. Donna is basking in the glow of attention from The Tin Man and Willy Wonka, not to mention a kiss that happened right in front of me from The Road Warrior. We wear the mask. And I, Aristaeus the Beekeeper, am walking with my friends who laugh at me and with me, who defend me and protect me, and who ask me why I would spend three hours or so with the biggest beeyatch in the bar, only to have her tell me that it’s not going to happen in the end. And I, Aristaeus the Beekeeper am happy because such is life. You open yourself to it or you miss it. And while “it” may not happen, life always will. We wear the mask.

Sundays just have a special feel to them. I wonder if it’s that number seven thing where human beings just love the number seven for some reason, and we decided that the seventh day is the end of a cycle of days and therefore special. Regardless, Sundays appear frequently in religious and literary works, and I feel it too. I love them because of that special feel, and I hate them because, toward the end, you know the special feeling is about to be replaced by work the following day.

Last Sunday was just special, no dread. Robby and I spent the morning and afternoon working through some Aristotle. It was his first graduate paper presentation, and he was understandably nervous. The issue was Aristotle’s virtue theory and the problems with it. There are many, but perhaps the most significant is that Aristotle bases his ethical theory on character or virtue, but even virtuous people behave differently in different situations, and in fact virtue itself is seen differently in different situations. So we hacked around on this old stump for several hours, and it was frustrating, exhausting, revealing, and fun.

Then Robby was off to go see U2 at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. It was being broadcast on YouTube, so I planned to watch it on the pretty Interwebs, as St. Mary calls them. It’s a series of tubes, you know. I had my walk to do, which was wonderful as usual, but first I had to call the pater familias, my father, who had turned 89. I’ve written about him before both here and in print, and I will likely write about him again in both mediums. He is simply one of the best people I know, and as we both grow older, he becomes more and more my role model. It seems odd to say that since he is almost ninety, and I live like I’m twenty sometimes, but it remains true. A self-taught, self-reliant, self-assured man who got that way by his own scratching and clawing at the world until he brought it under submission, my father is the source of the best of me. When I think through a problem and come up with a solution, I am reminded of him. When I weigh the possibilities of a situation and choose based upon my own sense of integrity instead of appeasing or bulldozing my way, I think of him. When I reflect upon my life and the ethical choices I have made and why, I think of his life and choices and how his virtue was both there and evolving in his own choices. Our conversations are not frequent; they do not need to be. He is always there in my mind and heart, inspiring and instructing me. Happy Birthday Dad.

Back home from the walk, I queue up YouTube and wait for the concert to begin. I contemplated buying tickets and going to the show, but I think I’m happy with my YouTube seat. I watch the concert and marvel at this band that I have been listening to since I was about twenty-four. I still remember buying the vinyl album of The Unforgettable Fire, and I can remember thinking while it played that I had never heard anything like this before. Bono’s anthemic lyrics delivered in shouts and whispers. Edge’s guitar playing that virtually created a world made of sound, a world of dark skies shot through with lightning bolts. I was living in Nashville at the time, going through one of the most bizarre times in my life (about which I should post, I guess), and U2 was this alternate universe where God and justice and love fought with evil and hate while Larry Mullen and Adam Clayton provided the beat of the drums and the pulse of the bass. I wanted to get lost there, and in some sense I’ve never left. At the end of the concert, an announcement appears that the rebroadcast will begin soon. I hear Robby come in the door and ask him how it was. “Amazing,” he says, shaking his head. Then out gushes a stream of adjectives and adverbs that I struggle to process they come so fast: transcendent, beautiful, powerful, passionate, carnivalesque, etc. Though he has just come from the concert, he sits with me through the entire rebroadcast. We sit in amazement, happy and content that these guys, my age, are still holding us, thrilling us, kissing us with their music. “Moment of Surrender” ends the show, and it hits me hard and good. Something about those lyrics, which are not poetic but are still powerful. Bono’s words are like Edge’s guitar: they are at times atmospheric, at times gut-hitting, at times anthemic. Whatever they are, they are meaningful to me, and I watch the Twitter feed on the site confirm from all over the world that tonight we are one. Tonight. A Sunday, Bloody Sunday in October.

The mocking of the gods I did in my last post was met with the expected retribution from them the next day. Of course the gods is a synonym also for human stupidity. Either way you say it, I messed up.

Having completed a major task for the day by 1:30pm, I decided it was time for my walk, and I determined that it was to be another ten-miler. I was so moved by the reverie and accomplishment of walking ten beautiful exhausting miles that was eager for the experience again. But I took little notice of the fact that I had not eaten and it was in the nineties, not to mention mid-day. To further prove my stupidity and to open myself up to more divine mocking, I decided I needed to quicken my pace, so I began the long incline of nearly four miles by nearly running, and when my heart and lungs began to complain, I ignored them, making sure that I did not lose my pace by increasing it just a bit. By the time I reached the country club, I was in trouble, breathing heavily and my heart actually hurting. Only then did I slow down, and I put my hands on my hips and took stock of things. I was about to throw up, but there was nothing in my stomach to churn out, and we all know how good that feels. My legs were weak, and I had to keep moving, albeit very slowly, or I was afraid I would cramp up. I was sweating profusely and at least four miles from home no matter which direction I took. Nice going, Aristaeus. You’re a real genius. Divine laughter pealed in the sky.

I still had the last bit of Canyon Drive to do, including the final steep incline, but I was just stubborn enough not to go back home the way I came. In fact, I figured that I could still do my ten-miler; I just needed to get past this last hill and take it easy the rest of the way, the rest of the way being another six miles. More divine laughter echoing off the hills. With great pain in my aching heart and legs, I crest the hill at Sunset Drive, climb the little berm that overlooks the valley, and collapse on the dirt. I have no interest in the view; all my attention is on my failing body. I am in the best shape of my life, and Dr. Gutierrez, my physician, is amazed at my condition. She has no other men my age under her care who exercise and eat well and have such good numbers as I do. I feel and look great, if I do say so myself. But today I am going to die on Sunset Drive because I have mocked the gods. It is bloody hot, the middle of the day, and I haven’t eaten or had anything to drink all day. Furthermore, I have set a new record for the time it takes me to reach this point. And now I am going to die.

I plan my funeral. Cool University will want to do some sort of memorial for me, but I want to keep the buzzards away, so I think I have to get to Robby somehow and tell him what to do. He is to not allow the harpies anywhere near this event, but he must fly Fyodor, Vivien, and Monique here from various parts of the country, and he can use the money from my estate to do that. They can say whatever they want of course, but Monique has to read Whitman’s “So Long.” Fyodor will quote from Cast Away (“You never know what the tide will bring.”) or Unforgiven (“I thought I was dead once too, but I was just in Nebraska.”) or Titanic (“Meet me at the clock.”). Robby and Vivian will sing Tom Waits and U2 and whatever Vivian comes up with for the moment. Other students and faculty will say some things, and it will all be good. Then they shall have a party at my place (they all have keys) that will go down in Buffalo history, surpassing all the other parties I have had at my place for sheer happiness and despair.

But I don’t carry the iPhone on my walk, only my keys, so I have to live long enough to reach Robby so he can plan my funeral, by which time I probably won’t need a funeral, but I have to take it one step at a time. Such is the logic of a dying man cursed by the gods. I still consider doing the ten-miles when my heart, beating slower now but sore, tells me that I am getting my ass home. I finally listen and cut through Caroline Park to find a direct path home.

As I wind my way back, I join the chorus of the gods and curse myself for being so stupid. I am always doing these kinds of things: pushing myself too hard at work or play, almost running out of gas, jumping into things up to my neck when I could just as easily wade in to my ankles. Is this a product of an open-road life? How do you love something or embrace life without going all-in? It’s something I’m still trying to learn, and the only thing that scares me more than going all-in when I shouldn’t is not going all-in when I should. So until I figure it out, I guess I’ll keep taking it to the limit, one more time.

My wiser self turns right to go back onto the main road so that if I collapse, someone will see me. I’ll try to stay conscious long enough to call Robbie and plan my funeral, and I marvel at why this concerns me so much since I won’t be experiencing my own death or any funeral. A mile from home, I am feeling better. My heart is still sore, but my pace has quickened to a normal stroll instead of my death march, and I can imagine making it home and not dying. I collapse on the couch with a Gatorade and contemplate my near-death experience.

No more work today because I’m too sore and tired, so I decide to watch some DVDs. I’ve been watching The Wire from season one on, and I am amazed and impressed by it. It is positively Shakespearian in the confluence of the real and the beautiful, the mundane and the sacred. After a few episodes, my muscles begin to mock me like the gods, and I take a hot bath. Still not up to eating or moving much, I decide to watch a movie: Million Dollar Baby. Great movie, bad idea to watch it today. Clint Eastwood’s directing and Hilary Swank’s acting are just too good, and by the end of the film I am crying and cannot stop. Damn it. Why do I do this to myself? I get online and Robby learns that I am upset, so he sends me a Zach Galifinakis video that only depresses me more.

Then the turn.

Though I haven’t spoken to her for a year now, St. Mary of Atlanta, Esq. starts texting me. Does she know how much I need to hear from her right now? We speak of the recent music she sent me, especially the Avett Brothers, and she asks what song I am listening to. “I and Love and You” of course, I tell her. She responds, “I and Miss and You,” and now I’m crying for a whole other reason. There’s a knock at my door, and it’s my friend Donna, who says we are going to the Thai place for dinner. Her goofy, smiling face is just what I need to see right now.  St. Mary keeps texting me, then Anna calls. I haven’t really talked to Anna since she visited LA last August, and over drinks we had a bizarre and funny conversation about Paolo and Francesca in the Inferno. But she is on the phone now, and Donna laughs as I text and talk on the phone while also talking to her sitting on my couch. It’s like this wave of love that washes over me, baptizing my despair and lifting me up to life. All shall be most well. All is most well.

While I’m not a fan of conventional poetry, preferring blank or free verse to the standard rhythms and meters, I have always appreciated one element of the sonnet. The sonnet has a rhyme and meter scheme, but it also has this wonderful device at line nine called “the turn.” It’s where the mood and action shift, sometimes dramatically, as the speaker gains a realization and moves toward the close of the poem. After line nine may be an answer to a question or a resolution to a problem, or it may just be that things turn from one direction to another, from dim understanding to awakening, from death to life. So here is a sonnet from one John Donne, a wonderfully crazy Christian and warrior poet, to all my wonderful crazy friends who helped me make the turn, and to the gods with whom I will always do battle but with respect.

Batter my heart, three-person’d God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

reverie |ˈrevərē|nouna state of being pleasantly lost in one’s thoughts; a daydream : a knock on the door broke her reverie | I slipped into reverie.• Music an instrumental piece suggesting a dreamy or musing state.• archaic a fanciful or impractical idea or theory.ORIGIN early 17th cent.: from obsolete French resverie, from Old French reverie ‘rejoicing, revelry,’ from rever ‘be delirious,’ of unknown ultimate origin.

We’ve had an early winter here in Eden. Last week the high was in the sixties, and we even had a day that was cloudy. I mean there were clouds in the sky all day, and it never got to seventy degrees. People emerged from their houses and wandered aimlessly looking for the sun. They had a dim memory of clouds from their travels back east but were more accustomed to smoke or smog than the blanket of gray that covered the blue they were supposed to see. I was happy for the gray for it matched my mood and invited introspection and contemplation. I thought of Calypso again and will post about her when I am ready. She deserves a post all to herself and much contemplation.

Soon enough the universe righted itself, the sun returned, blazing in the blue that stretched above us and providing the perfect backdrop for the tall palm trees that make up Coolville’s skyline. The temperature climbed accordingly, and my brisk winter walks turned into the usual summer walks that are sweaty but rewarding. I began my walk at 4:30 hoping to catch the sunset as I walked down Sunset Drive. My timing was perfect. On my way up toward the heights of Coolville, I saw Anita coming down the sidewalk. She has impaired vision and walks with a cane, and the first time I saw her, I passed her on the street so as not to scare her coming up from behind. She smiled and said hello and the vibe I got was “You can’t scare me clever man. Next time stay on the sidewalk.” We hadn’t really spoken before, but this time she saw me coming a ways off and began smiling immediately. She must be in her seventies, and she walks very slowly, but she walks every day. “What happened to our winter weather?” she asked playfully. “Gone with the Santa Ana winds, I guess,” I said, being playful myself. “My name is Aristaeus,”  I said and shook her hand, which still held her cane. “I’m Anita. I live in the white house with the green shutters.” We both looked up the hill, but I could not distinguish her house from the others. “My son is Ron Hadley, the dentist.” It always amazes me how people, especially in smaller towns, use their circles of motion as a common frame of reference for everyone. Her son the dentist was supposed to be known to me, a person she just met. “He does all the Rotary club and Kiwanis stuff,” she said, trying to help me orient myself to Ron the Dentist. “Ah, all the civic-minded things,” I said, trying to acknowledge Ron’s contributions without knowing or wanting to know who the hell he was. We paused on the sidewalk and chatted a bit more. She asked me where I lived and where I was walking. When I told her, she said “You’re a long way from home.” The phrase lingered with me the rest of the evening and even until now. It’s one of those moments that Whitman loved, and I do too. A break in the clouds of the mundane when the sacred shows through in a small but powerful way. “Yes I am,” I said. We parted with hopes of seeing each other again, and I continued up the hill, a long way from home.

My timing was perfect. Canyon Drive is now my old friend, and I know its twists and turns, its rises and falls very well. I climbed the last strenuous bit and emerged like a creation story onto Sunset Drive where I stopped to behold the valley below me bathed in the soft light of a western sunset. I always stop here, ostensibly to catch my breath, but really to “rejoice” or “revel” in the confluence of sunset, the valley, the ten-thousand foot peaks to my left, the deep bellowing of my lungs, and the drumbeat of my pounding heart. I can recapture this moment at any time in my memory, and I do so now as I sit in my air-conditioned home listening to new music from St. Mary of Atlanta. Being lost geographically is sometimes a precursor to being lost in reverie. This is why for Whitman the road must be open and for Heat-Moon the highways must be blue. You cannot plan these things. The gods laugh at our plans and dash them on the rocks like Odysseus’ or Aeneas’ ships. Of course the gods laugh at our failure to plan as well, which means that the gods suck and just want to mess with you, and you should just live your life without them. Albert Camus: “We must imagine Sisyphus happy.” And we must imagine him so because he provoked the gods and was punished but also because he provoked the gods in his punishment, turning each time to go back down that hill willingly to push the rock up again, owning his suffering and therefore taking it from the gods. In doing so, he becomes “like the gods, knowing good and evil.” Nothing makes the gods angrier than making yourself a god. That is the great secret of the gods: as they are, we can become. For a moment on a warm evening on Sunset Drive, I was Zeus, master of all I surveyed, fearful of nothing, in love with everything. Whitman: “The east and west are mine. The north and south are mine.”

My sojourner’s sense was telling me that if I turned on Edgemont then I could follow the ridge further south and still come back out on Sunset, only much further down on another street, so I decided to get lost again. I was right, as I often am about such things. A line from James Dickey’s Deliverance kept coming back to me. Ed Gentry has to climb a cliff above a river in the dark, and as he nears the top he remarks in reverie: “What a view. What a view. But I had my eyes closed.” “What a view,” I said out loud, as I walked the southern rim of the heights and lost myself in the scene before and below me. There was almost no traffic on the narrow road, and as usual there was no one outside or even stirring in the mansions that lined the ridge. One hill just below a mansion had been leveled off for a tennis court, and it bothered me tremendously to see it. I found myself frowning and wondering why. Something about cutting that hill off for a tennis court that no one would use except as a symbol of their wealth felt profane to me. I kept moving to make things whole.

The view itself, unexpected and sacred, changed my demeanor and lifted my spirits. I recalled a trip this summer to see my friend Mary of Boston (I know, I know. Lots of Marys. St. Mary of Boston is now St. Mary of Atlanta, Esq. I am speaking of another Mary). She was in San Diego, and I drove down to see her. It was a tough day, as these things sometimes go. I got started late, then spilled coffee all over my shirt and shorts, then had to stop and get new clothes, then was very late, then got harassed by stuff at work, etc. I was not good company, but Mary was patient and her usual pleasant self. We went to the botanical gardens and walked around Balboa Park. At dinner in the Gas Lamp district, she asked me what I would do if I didn’t have to work. I began talking of traveling, stopping in towns that interested me, teaching or working to make enough money for gas and food, moving on to the next town and next adventure, and writing about it all. After a while I noticed she was smiling at me. “Did I say something funny?” I asked. “No, she said, “I just finally saw Aristaeus for the first time today. You came alive.” I smiled too. She was right. She has this amazing ability to reveal these things to me at the most unexpected moments. She had noticed I was in reverie talking about a life without work full of travel and conversation and writing. She had seen me emerge like cresting the hill on Sunset Drive to see things more clearly.

The same thing happened as I walked this new route. I simply got pleasantly lost in my thoughts. I found myself thinking of my other friend’s suggestion that we go to South America over Christmas. She and I had threatened to go to Spain on a whim several times, and I told her “Do not say that shit because you know I will do it.” One night a few months ago, Fyodor and Robby were over, and I was in a dark mood. In fact I told Fyodor, who is a Dostoevsky scholar, that he liked “to play in the darkness, but I live in it everyday.” Fyodor still kids me about that. After a couple of bottles of Vodka among the three of us, he and Robby went outside on my patio to talk shit, while I stayed inside and played Jackson Browne songs on the guitar. Like I said, it was a dark night. Eventually, Robby came in and started longing to leave the country because he’s never been out of the US. “Where would you go?” I asked him. “Prague,” he said without hesitation. The next morning I woke up to Robby’s long legs hanging over my love seat while I was sprawled on my couch. On my MacBook was an Expedia page with two tickets to Prague queued up. Fortunately, I had not bought them, but I was obviously close. Robby doesn’t even have a passport, so my sense of adventure, coupled with Russian Standard, far exceeded my practicality. Also, did I mention it was a dark night? So my friend mentioned Spain again the other night, and I said “I’m in. Let’s go.” Testing me, she then said “How about South America instead?” I stopped and looked at her: “That’s perfect! Are you kidding me?” She replied, surprised, “Where would we go?” For some reason I knew. I said excitedly, “We’ll fly into Quito, Ecuador then take buses down through Peru and into Chile. We could probably even make it to Santiago. We’ll start in the Andes and work our way down the coast.” She looked surprised, and so did I. The rest of the night we talked about our plans. It looks like we will leave December 20.

As I walked along my new-found path in the setting sun, I thought about the trip and tried to imagine traveling through this amazing continent. Anna’s boyfriend is from Ecuador; I should call him and ask him about Quito and maybe get an invitation to stay with his family. I would scale the heights of Machu Picchu with a copy of Pablo Neruda’s “The Heights of Machu Picchu” and embarrass everyone by reading aloud from it.  I would travel the length of Chile with Che Guevara’s The Motorcycle Diaries and the even better (IMHO) Chasing Che by Patrick Symmes. I would learn Spanish by book and by immersion into the culture. It just wasn’t a long enough trip. How could I not see Rio and Sao Paulo? What about Buenos Aires, Caracas, Tierra Del Fuego? Can I come that close to the Galapagos Islands and not see them? Then I asked myself, “What do I have to come back for? Why couldn’t I stay as long as I wanted?” Immediately, my spirits began to lift like the moon over the mountains behind me. Freedom. To live without fear or commitment. To live not to work but to live. Why couldn’t I do this. Why shouldn’t I do this?

A sharp, annoying bark followed by voices broke my reverie. Around a curve Simon the dog, all six inches of him height-wise, was threatening to kick my ass. It’s always the little ones. Two beautiful labradors meanwhile lounged lazily in the grass, embarrassed by the shrill antics of the lesser being, and we acknowledged each other with the man-dog connection that I have had since I was a kid. I just understand them, and they understand me. The owner of the shrill one spoke shrilly to him and tried to get him to shut up and back off. I nodded to the two-leggeds and moved on down the road. But the reverie was gone. I looked back to see where I had come from because I couldn’t remember any of it. I was in South America for the last mile.

The true philosopher studies death, Socrates said, and though I am not even a false philosopher, I love the part of the walk that adjoins Coolville cemetery. My father used to say when we would pass a cemetery in the car: “Do you how many dead people there are in that cemetery?” My childhood self would ask “How many?” believing that my dad had magical powers and was perhaps a wizard. “All of them,” he would say and laugh. So I walked and looked at all of them, wondering about their lives, their regrets, their moments of reverie. It terrifies me to think I might miss something and end up there with them without having the courage to see it. As I reveled in the view I had just seen on the ridge above, I kept thinking about all the other views in the world that I hadn’t seen. The Andes, the Amazon, the Atacama Desert. “There is but a step between us and death,” a childhood sermon comes back to my mind. I keep stepping.

Back home, it is dark, it is 7:30, and I am exhausted, but I am also alive. So thrilled with the reveries of my walk, I crank up Penelope, and we do the same route in the dark. She is hesitant in the turns, and we both look for coyotes and deer in the darkness as she clocks the miles for me—9.9. I have walked 10 miles with my feet but crossed continents in my imagination, pleasantly lost but alive.

“All storytelling is constructed over a loss.” J. Hillis Miller

“There is only one story in the world: loss, loss, loss.” Tennessee Williams

As I look back on my life, like looking back at Mt. Shasta, the losses I have endured can also be seen as gifts. I do not think I am alone in sometimes clinging desperately to things that are hurtful, whether they be relationships, jobs, ideas, or places. Jackson Browne has a line that I have loved since I was a teenager: “Let your illusions last until they shatter.” It is easy to look back and see clearly that the things that were so large in our lives were hurtful and diminishing to our souls, and the next step is often to feel guilty about the choices we made. I lived this way a long time, feeling that I had failed at something, even wasted time. Only now am I seeing how wrong that was. I mean it is just incorrect, not morally wrong (don’t want to get back into the guilt cycle). When you see Mt. Shasta from the north, it is immense; that’s not an illusion or wrong. It is just that after time passes, the shapes of things change because you have changed, and you have changed because of those very things that appear different to you now. We should not belittle or begrudge those vehicles of change; they provided our metamorphosis. And I do not know if I ever want to get to a point where I draw back from life or love because I fear it will hurt me. I want to experience it all.

That seems to be the story of my life as I head toward fifty. To be open to the world, to the road, to others is to be an open wound. The wounds always heal, and you are always tougher and more enlightened because of it, but you always get new wounds. I regret nothing in my life. Nothing. I want to say yes to life every time because I get only one, and I do not want to miss anything. Give me the wound and the healing because the alternative is death. Give me the movement of the open road because the alternative is stasis. Give me loss. It is my greatest teacher, and it gives me life.

South out of Ashland, Oregon on the 5 freeway, Mt. Shasta celebrates and sings itself to all travelers. Its size warps one’s vision, and it takes several looks to get your eyes and mind around this thing that is so immense that it dominates the open skies of the west, so tall that it rips through the clouds that constantly surround it, so sacred that even interstate travelers on their way back to San Francisco or Los Angeles are given pause by it. Passing on the west side, you imagine what it is like at the top where snow remains year-round and spirits dwell as they have for thousands of years. If you were to drive further south and turn around and look at Shasta, you would see it as one of many peaks, the tallest and most majestic to be sure, but one of many and less imposing than the first view. Your perspective has changed over miles and over time. As Heat-Moon says, travel is a measure of change.

Mt. Shasta

Change indeed. The sacred journey began in Boston on a wet and sad day in May. It ended in southern California nine miles from the San Andreas fault. Now the journey begins again. Like Mt. Shasta from the north, the end of my journey here blotted out everything else on the horizon. All I could see was California and my new job and new life as an ending and a beginning. I’ll admit now that I also saw it as a reward for the suffering I endured in Boston, a promised land where dreams would be fulfilled and the past left behind in the perpetual sunlight of this magical place. All that happened to be sure. But the journey continues, and the end is now a new beginning. Looking back, the monumental Shasta is put into relief. It is now part of other mountains.

Once again I will be taking to the open road. Once again, what moves me forward is loss, and as before I will leave out the details because this is a blog about the sacred journey not the mundane or profane. The details are ugly and well-known to people who live, love, and work. What matters is how we move on. Whitman:

Mt. Shasta from the South