Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.

I must have run a mile yesterday morning, over dirt (and silt) roads, which was probably more of a workout for my ankles than anything else.

Along the way I had the sensation that some creature was stalking me from behind the first or second row of yellow, dried corn. But agriculture has a strange way of manipulating the breeze, and I soon discovered that the noise was localized, and that every where I stopped to investigate I only found corn sheaths rubbing up against one another. They just made a drier, huskier, less melodic version of the crickets’ legs rubbing, and actually both of these sounds blended into the wind. After I dispelled my fears of an intelligent coyote with more human hunting skills than even I would have had, I continued running to the reservoir about a quarter mile down the road. I passed little blue flowers on vines that were hugging the corn stalks to my right, and didn’t really pay them any mind because at the time they looked similar to the alfalfa flowers on my left.

As I approached the reservoir, I saw a white crane feeding on the bottom, and it didn’t take long to spot me jogging near . The reservoir had almost emptied, with maybe a few inches of water at the bottom now. But the crane was embarrassed at this, because as soon as it saw me, it flurried away hurriedly, disappearing into the alfalfa a few seconds later. I pondered this (a little sleepily) as I ran to my stopping point. All I could do was run around the corn field, but at the other end, which was close to my starting point, there was no way to cut across in front without having to run all the way around the neighboring house (which also serves as a base for a trucking company with scary Mexican clowns painted on the backs of the cabs). So I had to retrace my steps, or so I thought.

Today as I ran I found that the roads do connect, sort of, and so I can run a round trip around the corn field. As I ran this morning, I saw the same crane, but it was already on its way over the alfalfa to the southwest. I toed in a few anthills to liven up the ants’ day. I remembered the blue flower that I had picked yesterday, which had wilted by the time I had gotten back to ask my grandmother what kind it was. She told me it was a Morning Glory, and it was a threat to the crops because it takes over.

And it had taken over: the entire cotton field to the north of the corn field was topped by a crowd of blue flowers and creeping vines, and even though I knew it was a cotton field, it didn’t look like one.

I said that the blue flower had wilted by the time I got back home, and it had, but it had actually wilted a minute or two after I picked it. Milky liquid dripped on my fingers as I ran, and I thought about what being connected to a vine might be like, in the physical sense (I am connected to the Vine, and if you don’t know what that means, see the gospel of John, chapter 15, verses 1 through 11). I don’t believe that flowers have identity apart from their place on a vine, if they had identity in the first place. A flower without a vine (for the creeping varieties, that is) is a wilted or dead flower, or at least is struggling to survive, and dying in its struggle, perhaps when someone picks it and puts it in a small vase in the kitchen window.

So I started thinking: is this a symbol for the rest of life? Is my family a vine in a sort of way? I do depend on them in some ways, but not for nutrition or safety. I see commercials and ads for gangster movies where the slogans are a dark interpretation of “Family is everything” but I don’t think I’d go that far. What about spiritual nutrition? It’s possible, but it’s nothing predictable or secure, because even the most righteous and pious relative can fall into sin.

And I wound back up with the One True Vine, because that’s what was in the back of my mind the whole time, and I have since dispelled the fear that something running beside me is actually threatening, when it is not. Literature in general and other arts would have us believe that Christianity is not the fuel for creative thought, and the advocates dog us from angles we don’t even realize.

When I get started on this topic, it’s hard to end, and since I can’t have the rest of my day to write, I will remain focused on some meditations, for your reading pleasure and for my mental sharpening.

C.S. Lewis is the person who comes to mind when I try to think up clear, Christian thought, besides the obvious Apostles and Jesus himself. I have read several of Lewis’ books and some of his essays, and his thinking, while not perfect or inspired, is clear and effective. When I read The Four Loves I understood what love was a little better, not with a handful of poignant stories of true love or true friendship or cozy anecdotes about the familial bond. He explained the concept of the four different types of love in a way that made me rethink my writing technique. Before was this: conceptual is bad, and concrete is good. After reading Lewis and his efficient, understandable, and Christian literature, is this: concrete is good, and conceptual is good if it’s good. Conceptual writing is boring, for the most part, and also for the most part I want nothing to do with it.

But here I am, writing about the concept of conceptual writing. And here I am, amending my writing philosophy, and coming back to the One True Vine, where I’ve been all along, and where I thought would be a sub-artistic point to be (because, we all know, that true artists have to chain-smoke, choke down liquor, and revert to at least one sexual topic in anything they do).

The concept of the Vine in the Christian life is crucial to say the least; there is no Christian life without this concept. Without the actual Vine, and the connection to it for the Christian, there is mere, base nominal Christianity, which seems to be only useful for preaching the gospel for any reason, although not necessarily condoned by the Apostle Paul, as seen in Philippians 1:15-18. The Vine should be recognized as being as important as a physical vine is to a Morning Glory. Jesus himself said, “Without me you can do nothing.” The Vine supplies strength, truth, and vitality to those connected. And the Vine is the strongest social network: meeting a fellow Believer (not just a Proclaimer) is always an exciting occasion!

In the vast scope, the sovereignty of the Vine, which he claims, provides atomic motivation for life to continue. In the minute scope, the Vine provides the comfort a Believer desires in even the smallest situations, such as when a tire blows out. And life on the Vine is the best life there is, no holds barred. Other types of lives may sprout up on their own, seeking their own merit, but they die off eventually. Only life on the Vine has the source to keep life vibrant in the droughts, anchored during storms, and fed in the famines.

Every other creed attempts to define life in some new, personal angle. Only Christianity thrives and survives on the concept of the Vine. Hedonism is the culmination of all the overtly selfish tendencies, but even more pious creeds like Buddhism (with the concept of nirvana) stress the self as the goal for any sort of improvement or fulfillment. The goal of nirvana is separation, nothingness, identity lost. The humanistic, psychological ideal of self-actualization is more or less the same idea, though many people will claim that someone who is self-actualized will be able to interact better with others, which begs the question: will that person care?

Christianity is the Vine, and everything else is a flower that blooms and dies in the desert, all in the span of a breath. King Solomon had this idea (over and over and over, et cetera, again) in his Ecclesiastes. He claimed that all life was like this, though he also kept on coming back to the command to fear God and enjoy life to the fullest (which reminds me of what I think is one of Martin Luther’s quotes: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and strength and do whatever you want”). Jesus wasn’t grabbing ideas out of the air when he said that he was the Vine. It’s the perfect illustration for the Christian life. I’ll bet God had it all planned out from eternity past, to create a type of plant that stemmed off its fruit and flower from a vine, just so he could perfectly illustrate Christ’s relationship to Believers.

All that from running around a corn field. I need to keep my muscles more active, on my body and in my mind. It’s been a while since I’ve run, and a while since I’ve written. I’ll write more.

I have never really found my identity in a theater, or even on the television, whether watching something on cable, local channels, or rented movies and films . But I think some people have.

Watching pre-teens and teenagers define themselves by paraphernalia and attitudes from the movies and TV shows is daunting and discouraging at the least. I don’t know how they can do it. Stores like Target and Walmart capitalize on these trends and then have a feeding frenzy. As a result of (or at least an uncanny correlation with) the recent Superman movie, I have seen too many boys wearing t-shirts and sweaters with the near-universally-recognized S symbol. Creativity has been malnourished, and is crawling to the door of its cell, breathing with pain, only kept alive by the remnant’s discreet care packages.

Is it a wonder that the postmodern, non-gendered “person” is griping about the difficulties of the search for identity? Boys can’t be boys unless they choose to be boys. Likewise with girls, except girls are encouraged to be more of boys than girls. Maybe we should realize that identity isn’t as elusive as we think it is. Reality and identity don’t come in bottles, and you can’t buy them at IKEA, so maybe we should look for them in other venues.

Jason Bourne found his identity three days ago. And he generated more than seventy million dollars in that time. Amnesia and many, many injuries hindered his identity-search, but he found it, and his case of amnesia is the best used in Hollywood in decades, to my knowledge. Leonard Shelby comes close, except Memento didn’t deal with any kind of amnesia—it was anterograde amnesia (Shelby’s mind could not translate short-term memory into the long-term memory banks). Jason Bourne, though, had the foggy and reverb-filled flashbacks little by little, the standard treatment.

Seven years ago Bourne started making his income, which is rising as I write this, and is right now somewhere around three hundred million dollars. Shelby tried hard, but only made twenty-five million; he doesn’t mind, though, because his audience is mainly among the college students and curious, older, intellectuals, and, of course, the immature kids who get a rush from hearing swear words. Bourne’s audience is who used to be called Everyman, but who has since been neutered, because those who speak this language forgot that the masculine pronouns and such have always been neuter unless specifically referring to a male. Everyperson watches the Bourne movies with triumph, and walks out of the theater or turns off the DVD player with confidence, saying, “I, too, can be Jason Bourne.” But then they catch themselves, saying, “But I cannot be Jason Bourne, because he is already someone, and I am not yet anyone, and if I become Jason Bourne then I will only be one of them.”

Bourne may be the new James Bond, or the new, better-groomed, better-mannered Walker, Texas Ranger. But he is so much more to the postmodern journeyperson (silly me, I almost wrote “journeyman”). He is the epitome of the Search with the capital S. He is the hero of our cause; we have lost our identity down the rain-gutter of our discontent, and he has swam through the oceans to find it. Of course, on the way to his swim, he had to jump off of a twenty-story building.

Leonard Shelby lost his identity and can never recover it. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before he’ll wake up in prison, not knowing how he got there, and won’t believe the guards who insist that he was proud to have killed several “John G’s”. There will be Polaroids of Shelby with blood on his chest, happy that he has once again (for the first time) avenged his wife’s death. But he will burn them if he can because his identity cannot be at rest.

Jason, on the other hand, had to do what he could to get his identity back, and that was his goal. He is the cheerleader of the power of identity; he woke up with holes through his whole body, confused, but soon realized that he has all the identities that he needed to shift around the world as needed. And soon enough he found out that he could run really fast, jump across rooftops, kill people with ordinary household objects, and speak at least four foreign languages. I wish I could wake up and speak Italian. Everyperson wants to wake up and have the training to elude fifteen police cars until they have all either given up, crashed, or blown up.

And driving away from the theater, Everyperson thinks, “Maybe, even though I cannot be Jason Bourne, I too can drive off of roofs and weave through traffic like a crochet needle. Or maybe I can at least feel the triumph in saying, ‘I remember everything, and now I am who I am!’” Now, I wrote that for effect, but I believe that anyone would like to make that claim. Jewish people, at very least, will realize the danger and gravity of making such a statement, and would, at least traditionally, condemn such a statement as usurping YHWH’s identity.

I hope that we are wise enough to know that idols can be made out of thought bubbles as well as wood. That glorious identity over on the other side of the stream, where the grass isn’t as whithered as it is over here, is a god. But just because Jason Bourne remembered everything doesn’t mean he’s a pagan. In fact, his dogtags said he was a Catholic. The fact still stands, though, that people can make an idol (an inferior, vastly inferior, image of the real thing) of a picture of Jesus. Bourne is no real Messiah, but he is a literary and visual character, not inherently evil, and has become a Messiah for Everyperson, who has made its pilgrimage to Edwards Cinema to find its nirvana.

Nirvana, though, is the wrong term, because the idea of nirvana is losing all identity. So this, therefore, is an inverted nirvana. But Everyperson is content to rebel against all preconceived religious standards, because Everyperson also has a trusty sidekick, Anycreed. Anycreed is the shadow cast behind Everyperson, changing with every step that Everyperson takes, and growing and shrinking depending on the time of day. And Anycreed pants and pines for the success of Jason Bourne.

Shelby is the failure of the identity god, the dismal view of the 90s, drinking beer and mucus while Everyperson sits at the bar and laughs or pities him. But Bourne is the champion, the model, the type.

I can still smell the thick, pungent air when I step outside. It should have been gone long ago; it’s been a week, and it doesn’t smell any more pleasant. There’s trash on the lawn, there’s no roof on the studio, the garage has the smell trapped inside, and the posts on the back fence are charcoal, at least on the surface. And yes, all the trash on the lawn is there for a purpose. We’re waiting for some place to put it all.
    Last week I heard a noise while I was on my computer (it was a loud hum), and apparently the dog heard it too, and thought much of it. The noise was soon replaced by much barking, and then the sounds died down to nothing noteworthy. I decided to take a look out the front window to see what went on. Because of the angle the window allowed me, I could only see two white trucks parked on the street, which was a little out of place because they were in front of the house, but not strange because there are always white trucks parked on the side of the street. The farmers are consistently checking on their produce, moving irrigation hoses, and having farmers’ conversations on the side of the road. So I thought nothing of it.
    I went back to the computer, still thinking nothing of it. Not too much longer the phone rang, and I answered. A woman’s voice asked if there was anything wrong.
    “I don’t think so,” I said.
    “Well, I saw fire engines, and every time I see fire engines, I always think something’s going on with your grandparents,” she said. Apparently she thought I was in the next generation up. They were my great-grandparents, living next door.
    “I don’t think there’s anything wrong, but I’ll go check anyway.”
    I got ready for work, because I was headed that way anyhow, at my own leisure (which is how my part-time job is set up). I locked up the house and went next door to see what was happening. As I turned the corner around the carport where my car was parked, my stomach sank. There, on the front lawn and in the driveway, were two fire engines and various other trucks.
    Something’s wrong with Grandad, I thought. But then I saw him riding around on his electronic scooter, so I thought, Something’s wrong with Granny, until I saw that he wasn’t upset at anything. As I walked closer and closer I got more and more puzzled. If the fire engines were going to be out there for any reason, it was going to be some sort of problem with my great-grandparents…
    …or a fire, which I saw being put out as soon as I rounded the corner of their house. It was the studio, where Granny used to paint, and now it had no roof. There were seven or eight firefighters milling around, pulling art frames and a couch out of the studio.
    Granny had been burning paper trash, as she usually does, back by the corn field, when a breeze kicked up and brought a cinder to the studio’s roof. A neighbor farmer out in the fields saw the blaze (it must have been big because the fence was burned behind it, three or four feet away at least), and called the authorities; it wasn’t clear whether or not Granny or Grandad noticed anything was wrong.
    By the time I got near it, the whole structure was soaking wet, dripping black water and seething the mighty stench of burning civilization. Two and a half walls were still intact, along with the floor, but this was hardly a building anymore; though maybe it might be a good location for a photo shoot, as long as it’s before we tear it down all the way.
    I watched as a firefighter gingerly put down two frames in front of me, and recognized them as having been up on my wall just a month before in my Newhall apartment. I had stored them in the studio for a time, and now they’re on the lawn, exposed to the elements except for the parts covered in smeared ash.
    I watched another of the firefighters, with his mustache of some ancient fortitude, trimmed to regulations. His face was sooty, his shirt was sweaty, and his hat was just like in the movies. I don’t see firefighters in their get-up often. I listened in to some of the conversation they were having.
    “So I said, what street? I have no idea where that is!” I heard one say, presumably about finding this country address. He went on walking, talking and laughing with a fellow about this potentially dangerous situation.
    I guess firefighters have their own brand of gallows-humor. When you’re in a situation as serious as a house-fire, too much serious thinking will probably do more harm than good. Here was this young fireman, chatting it up with his coworker, laughing about something that would have given me knots in my back for a week or two.
    I watched, because watching was the only thing I could have done, another firefighter tearing down the south wall with a pickaxe. I got some information from my second-uncle Les (I think he’s my second uncle, anyhow; I’m never sure with all these family titles, especially with all these relatives around). He had been there for a while, and he told me how it happened. Then I left for work.
    Later that day I walked around the site and called my parents to tell them what happened. I had to walk around the couch, the easels, the frames, the boxes of books, and a table to get inside the burned-out building. The floor was sturdy except for one section on the west side. The smell was unbearable, even through my shirt, which was pulled up over my nose. I couldn’t stay there long, so I left.             
***
    A few days ago, I heard some noises again, and heard the dog barking that special bark that says, “Something is wrong” rather than announcing the presence of a squirrel or an intriguing lizard. I also heard a shout. I’d better investigate this time, I thought.
    I went through the back gate this time, and I heard the shout again, but I couldn’t make out what was being said. It was Granny, though. I knew that much. I turned a corner and saw both Granny and Grandad huddled over the scooter. Grandad had lodged it in the flowerbed. He was in his socks, trying to pull the scooter out with no luck.
    I pulled it out. It was lighter than I thought it was, and I almost pulled it over Grandad’s feet on the way back out of the flowerbed.
    Granny and Grandad thanked me, and then Granny said, implying a reason for the accident, “This is the first time he realized there was all this trash in the yard!”

Until the song is over, my name is no longer Samuel. It is Phillip, or Jake, or Spade, or I go without a name, with only the title of my profession–and I’m not talking about being a student or a petty locksmith; I’m talking about solving crimes, putting the yeggs in the can, tracing the calls so I can find the kidnaped daughter of the rich man. The song plays, and I wish there were a million other songs like it, so I could further my imagination, and create my own world like this one. I am the Op, the Gumshoe, the sad but strong icon of a lost age, standing in contrast with the sad and weak icons of this age. I am–well, the song is over now. Back to Macroeconomics.
    Of course, the image is stronger than reality. Would I really like to be in the shoes of Marlowe, uncovering gruesome crime rings only by acting like I want to fit into them? Would I prefer a blackjack over reason? Would I use violence for good guys or the crooks, just as long as I get the job done? Play it again, Sam.
    The image stands by itself, alluring, underneath a streetlight on a foggy street, somewhere in some run-down urban paradise–he is lighting a cigarette (always the cigarette, and we don’t wonder about lung cancer for the Private Eyes or the Sleuths, because– it’s the image, man!), he is scuffing his shoe, his is looking around as he takes a drag, and he is checking his watch as he exhales and adds tobacco smoke to the fog. His eyes would probably be bloodshot from lack of sleep (“I’m going to take a long, long breath after this joint is pulled”), his face unshaven, unless the job calls for him to look sharp, say to get into a strict-admission club, and he is not happy, never happy, quite the opposite of happy.
    The image of this intrigues me because of the authority that comes with the jobs. The wit is sharp, the comebacks are smart, the conclusions drawn are smart. The life of the P.I. has to be smart, I guess. Or at least the image that he puts up when he’s on the job.
    But how much substance is behind this image? Is there purpose in the life of a Shamus? There’s plenty of lingo, lots of sharp wit, and usually seduction, but is there purpose? I can hardly imagine a private investigator seeking the will of God or the meaning of life on his downtime. There may be some real-life ones who do, but the job is enveloped in pulling up the roots of people’s motives, and those roots are muddy and ridden with grubs. Without the character of a saint, what could a private investigator (or anyone who fits into any of the film noir archetypes) do to keep himself unstained by all the things he is paid to uncover? And, with the character of a saint, would he want to keep the job?
    “It’s a job like no other, but someone has to do it.” Sure, that’s logic for you, but how sound is it? True, there have to be plumbers and ditch-diggers and dog-trainers, but there need not be any prostitutes, drug-pushers or crime-lords. Those are all less-than-desirable jobs, but the first set are still moral in essence. The problem is not necessity here, but trying to fix all of our collective problems after the fact. Proverbs 21:3 has a good thing to say to this: “To practice righteousness and justice is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice.” This is practical in any life: it’s better to not make the mistake in the first place than to have to clean it up. (Of course, it is so much heavier for us Christians, and it is likely that non-Christians will not care as much as we should.)
    The root of the issue here is the image of an unnecessary and dark profession, which I still enjoy. Have I defeated myself? Well, I see that the image is not directly linked to depravity, although there is an association. And I definitely wouldn’t pass myself off as a matrimony detective in public, much less consider becoming one. Will I despise the image of American society today–the blue jeans, the t-shirts, the sneakers, the sunglasses–just because we have so many problems as a society?
    The difference between the image of the private detective and the image of the drug dealer he’s trailing is different. Even if it’s only the 1940’s dress-casual look, with the fedora, the suit, the Florsheims, and the fancy lighter, the aura of the character is still appealing for the better parts. The wit, the problem-solving, and the snappy attire are all good.
    Maybe I just like the image because of those things. Maybe if I knew that someone had a problem with that image, I would drop it. If I had to choose between having someone think I had an interesting hobby and having someone think that I dabbled in the world of the booze, floozies, and drugs, I would go without it. But as for now, well, let’s just say I’d rather appreciate the look of Sam Spade than Obi-Wan Kenobi or John Wayne.
    By the way, the song ended a long time ago. I just got a little carried away.

    Stubborn, stubborn, stubborn. Every wonder why mothers say that word three times in a row? It’s sort of mystical, or something.
    One stubborn won’t do, because he’s not only a little stubborn. To be a little stubborn is not to be stubborn at all. That’s just only unwittingly picky. That’s refusing to do something once in a lifetime, but then finding out you were wrong, and amending your smorgasbord of preferences.
    Stubborn-stubborn doesn’t cut it either: that’s only self-willed, able to think independently, which I’m certain is a crusade of the last thirty years or so. Stubborn-stubborn is just the embodiment of an ideal that is everyone’s enemy, according to the media and popular self-help regimes. “Don’t be a drone! Be a stubborn-stubborn! Think for yourself!” I’m not so sure what this will actually accomplish, because there have only been relatively few noteworthy bastions of stubborn-stubborn. Rosa Parks, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Michael Moore are all stubborn-stubborns in my book–although Rosa Parks is both a stubborn-stubborn and a stubborn-stubborn-stubborn, but the hard thing about that is how to consolidate her two titles into one: it’s not stubborn-times-five, because that would put her on the same plane as Michael Moore, who is a stubborn-stubborn and a stubborn-stubborn-stubborn-stubborn-stubborn. And he is not a stubborn-times-seven. Anyhow.
    Stubborn-stubborn-stubborn is planting your shoes into the wet concrete so you can step into them whenever you feel so inclined. It’s when a little girl won’t eat brussel sprouts only because they were ridiculed on a cartoon, and swears that they taste like dirt even though she’s never tried one. It’s when people do things just for the principle. Stubborn-stubborn-stubborn is the ultimate postmodern mindset: it does what it so pleases, thank you very much, because I want to, darn it. And sometimes there’s a lot more colorful language involved if it gets personal.
    And you thought they were just saying it because it made a nice little ditty.

    The aroma of self-sufficiency stood staunch, close to the customer-picked stacks of fir and redwood lumber. Then on to the tool section, where anyone can buy his way (on sale) into the domain of do-it-yourselfers. Then toward the automated checkouts with the planks I was going to buy, but I forgot something else. I heard something that didn’t fit the warehouse setting, but paid it no heed.
    The hardware superstore is an interesting setting for a view of cosmic irony. Human intentions have a way of inadvertently, or at least silently, staking claims that they swear will never be penetrated. There is always the war between nature and nurture. There is always the ivy-covered building, down the street from a brand new department store with its polished glass doors, and if they’re not careful both of the buildings will look the same in twenty years or so. Usually things like that take a long time. It’s not like drug stores suddenly get overrun by stray dogs or warrior crows. But sometimes–
    As I stood in line to check out, I noticed what the foreign sound was. I usually heard it in quiet neighborhoods and in the park, but here it was: sparrows in the rafters–many of them. And come to think about it, they were pretty loud. I don’t know how I didn’t notice it earlier. They were calling each other, and it was clear that they had made this hardware superstore their home.
    The roll-up doors for large loads in and out served as an easy entrance for the birds. There were too many of them to have gotten in by accident, when the automatic doors happened to be open.
    The line was slow going. I stared at the birds, thinking of what I would write about them. Then two of them started to fight, and the decision had been made. There, up above me, was another civilization. Up in the painted, brilliant white metal beams and air conditioning ducts was a world of air-dwellers, unaware of the commerce below them and unconcerned about the racket they were making. They didn’t care; the two feisty ones pecked at the other’s head.
    I’ll pretend there were two other people in the whole building who noticed the birds. One was the manager and another was an old woman, in for her replacement daisies, replacing the ones that the neighbor’s dog shredded in pursuit of its tennis ball.
    The manager is upset because of the mess he knows the birds are making somewhere, and that they’ve been inside the store for four days now, and there’s no easy way to get them out. I have a closing time, and they’re not going to know that, he mutters to himself. I can’t shoot them. That would just cause too much trouble. I can’t do anything but, confound it, I have a store to maintain! I can’t have a bunch of messy birds enjoying themselves at my expense!
    The old woman (I’ll call her Gladys, because I think that was a popular name back in the 1940s) hears the birds and remembers raising that blackbird with the broken leg from its mother’s negligence until it was ready to fly away by itself. She sees again how birds have no sluggish movements whatsoever–everything is urgent and sudden with birds, and she chuckles. There’s always a fire somewhere, if you’re that small and fragile–can’t let the big guy get ya!
    Neither of them is going to get the birds out without a huge effort, and Gladys is going to be out of the store in twenty minutes anyhow. The manager is going to put up with it, but grumble throughout the day. Gladys and I will go home and tell a loved one, “I saw sparrows in the roof of the hardware store today.” The manager might go home and say the same thing, but maybe with a few swear words in there somewhere.
    The manager will war against nature with no plausible means to win, because, darn it, he’s no hippie and he’s got a store to keep up so customers keep on coming back. No customer wants to have nasty birds pooping on their products.
    Of course, Mister Manager, but consider that some of us could be cheered up by the critters and can always reach for the garden hose without the bird droppings on it. I’m no hippie either. I can’t speak for Gladys–maybe she is a hippie. But at least we’re not fighting a war with no profit. We’d rather join the stubbly ranks of an army of amputees in jogging clothes fighting a band of crazed steamroller operators than join a campaign against nature.
    The birds are going to come in; there’s no getting around it. The ivy is going to creep, and the wasps are going to chip away the wood. The gophers will destroy the foundations and the perfect lawns, and the bluejays will make you wash your car every week (unless you learn your lesson and stop parking under the power lines!). And, yes, woodpeckers actually do make those holes in the telephone poles.
    How about instead of getting peeved at something that has no emotional capacity to return the gesture–how about we enjoy creation? I surely did as I walked out of the store thinking about how tigers respect no surround sound systems, how you’ll never convince a cat to play Nintendo, how the birds make a mess out of the storefront signs with their nests, and how dogs never understand most of what you yell at them when you find out they’ve spent the night on the brand new sofa. What’s the use?
    I have roleplayed enough with the manager and Gladys, and poof! They disappear, leaving only me walking back to the van, rolling the noisy cart with at least two wheels that only spin around and around instead of helping balance the thing. And I noticed that the wood that I loaded into the back of the van was indeed a reminder that it goes both ways: we invade nature, and nature invades our worlds built out of its worlds. It all works out, and it’s plenty fertilizer for a nice crop of smiles and sighs.

Last night was 70s bowling night and I won. In the fifth round, my zipper split, and in the seventh the seam burst down the middle of my pants. I untucked my shirt to hide the color of my underwear and played to a score of 156. Before bowling was quite the different experience. My best girl and I went to the theater to see Spider-Man 3. We were excited about it, but not nearly as excited as the forty or so fans ahead of us in line, who might have been waiting there for a few hours. It was a sight that reaffirmed the validity of the comic-book-nerd stereotype: mostly males, from a broad range of age and experience, unkempt hair, hand-held video games in hand, hunched over, and blowing cash on oversalted popcorn and syrupy sodas. There was a family ahead of us, a father, an older son, and three daughters. Two of the daughters were teenaged; one was younger than ten. They discussed buying soft drinks and other overpriced goods until they ran out of things to say. Then the two teenaged daughters walked off so they wouldn’t have to stand in line for a long time—let the men do that. But the youngest girl wanted to stay with her dad. I saw a close bond between the oldest son and the youngest daughter. He held her and then set her down and started playing a game of slapping hands (gently) with her, trying to get her riled up for the movie by putting some sort of Spider-Man theme on the game. While this was all going on, a wild herd of long-haired, loud-mouthed boys of ten or younger ravaged the miniature video arcade to out right. They did what they wanted. I asked, “Where are their parents?” and was reminded of my own age. No one came to rebuke them or at least make them set the arcade machines back in their original positions. They finally got tired of the place and migrated away. Inside the theater, thirty minutes before the movie started, it seemed like there were already a hundred people sitting in the seats. Two theatric high school Spider-Man fanboys game an impromptu pep rally before the advertisements started playing on the screen. The speech had no substance, but had plenty of gusto. It ended with one of the boys just saying, “So, Spider-Man 3,” and everyone cheering. The movie eventually started, and there was much rejoicing. I had heard snippets of good reviews of the movie, and the first two Spider-Man movies were surprisingly good for blockbusters, so I was expecting at least a good show. I got a good show, but that was all. The special effects were spectacular, but the regular effects, like the ones good stories are based on, were weaker than mediocre. Aristotle would have slapped the writers. It was more interesting listening to the crowd’s responses to the actions on the silver screen. They cheered as if Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst were their high school comrades and they were watching a high-production school play. There was a point where Spider-Man became bad (with a meaningful but paper-thin reason) and began acting like a biker punk, disrespectful and harsh, and that is when the crowd cheered the most. I said to Sarah: “This audience is cheering for the wrong things.” I was reminded of someone telling me that a popular fast food restaurant had been using cardboard in their food as filler, and though I don’t know how reliable that statement was, it is still a good image for how the crowd received this movie. The filler, what was supposed to be the most meaningful and nutritious, was empty. The plot of this movie (it doesn’t deserve to be called a film) had a purpose: to provide a means to get from one display of computer-graphics prowess to the next dull, cliché comic effort. The crowd loved it. Sarah and I walked out after the credits started showing us names no one ever pays attention to. We both had a leery look on our faces. I called it “Okay at best.” She just said she didn’t like it. Am I grateful that my girlfriend is a good student of rhetoric! I’m not happy that she was displeased along with me, but I am happy that she is not just one of the crowd. I heard a lot of people saying they were just happy that so-and-so character was actually put into the movie. I chose not to write a review of the movie because I am not a qualified film critic. What I am qualified to do is to write my observations and gatherings. I am always looking, watching, and taking notes, especially in public. Sarah and I then drove to the bowling alley, and as I bowled and as my pants split, I thought it a good metaphor for what I did to the movie in my mind by rising above the “I’ll take what I get” attitude. I ripped it open.

The window was open a little last night, and some cigarette smoke began to drift in from my downstairs neighbors. I was practicing my guitar, but as soon as I sensed the flavor of the smoke I was transported. I tripped into the past.

I was a construction worker, measuring and cutting drywall, working at the Bour house. I worked alongside Andy and Ben, but another troupe of laborers hung drywall elsewhere in the skeleton of the house. We were young and they were older. They were David, Loretto, Chris, and Wes.

Andy, Ben, and I would work through our morning and afternoon breaks so we could take an hour break for lunch. The rest of the workers would take smoking breaks in the morning and afternoon, but they would smoke the rest of the day anyway. Anyone could walk around that construction site blindfolded and tell where the chain-smokers were. Their skin and clothes reeked of tobacco—well, except for Chris. Chris’ skin and clothes reeked of tobacco and alcohol. He was drunk every day I ever saw him.

Chris would show up whenever he wanted to, wobbling on his bike with a cigarette hanging off his lower lip and mumbling some hard rock lyric. He talked dirty, listened and wailed along to metal and country-pop on the radio, and seemed to be impervious to pain. His fingers were always bloody somehow, and I don’t know how he did it. Once I accidentally drilled a Phillips bit through my left thumbnail, and I was out of commission for a half hour or so.

Chris, on the other hand, would repeatedly hammer his fingers, drill them, and slice them open with razor knives that we used to cut the drywall. He would just cuss and keep on working. Sometimes he would bring in some cup from a fast food restaurant, but I knew it was full of alcohol because of the way it smelled and the way he drank it.

Our contractor, Merv, would usually comment on the other workers to me. He would say things like, “Yep, he’s always drunk but he gets the job done.”

Chris and I had a few meaningful talks, mostly about things I never wanted to talk about. One of them ended up with Chris saying, “Well, I guess you’re a bigger man than I am if you don’t need to sleep with a woman to love her.” This was sort of a nightmare for me, because he was almost always bellowing everything he said.  

Chris wore almost the same thing every day. It was a gray, stretched-out t-shirt, blue jeans (dirty, of course), and beige work boots. Everything he touched smelled like alcohol, much to my dismay when he asked to borrow my cell phone. He had to call some sort of agency to arrange a meeting with his son. He was incredibly polite on the phone, but when he got off he would curse the mother of his son. He handed me back my phone and it was oily and potent. I might have gotten drunk just by putting it up to my face. I waiting until he was out of sight to wipe it on the underside of my t-shirt, with vigor.

Loretto was a quiet illegal Mexican immigrant who ate habañeros every day with his lunch, washing it all down with salted lemonade. He would give me Spanish lessons and would congratulate me when I could communicate with him in his native language. He called Andy, Ben, and David by different names. Andy was Dandy, Ben was Benz, and David was Davis-Davis-Davis-Davis-Davis-Davis, sung in a little ditty.

Loretto was a smoker too, but not as much as the other three. He was always cheerful, because, I supposed, he was earning money for his family. He was a Catholic, but believed that the Bible was all myth. He and I talked about the Bible on several occasions. He also shared his habañeros with me once.

We were in the garage, having lunch on stacks of drywall sheets. Andy, Ben, Loretto, and I talked about whatever came up in our lunchtime banter, until the conversation came around to Loretto’s peppers. I asked if I could try one, and Loretto said yes. I bit the pepper off at its stalk and told Ben that it was good and he should try one.

I held back my tears as the acids of the pepper saturated my taste buds, chewing the whole time. Ben put one in his mouth and bit, and that’s as long as I held my true reaction back. I fumbled for whatever liquid I could drink as Ben started turning red, jumping up, and doing whatever he could to alleviate the heat.

I had a good laugh amidst my habañero tears and red face, and so did Andy and Loretto. Ben wasn’t enjoying himself, but he got over it and our friendship suffered no harm. I still don’t know how Loretto ate two or three of the peppers every day.

Merv usually chuckled at things he saw Loretto do.

There were only a few times when I saw Wes’ mouth without a cigarette, it seemed. I think he was an Okie; at least he talked with the drawl. His speech was short, though, blurred and rapid: “Gimm’ thet thar ham’r.” He wore a dirty baseball cap over his dirty blond hair, always had sunglasses on, and wore his mustache long. His arms were too thin, with the veins and arteries protruding like mole tunnels. He looked like he was as old as Merv (in his 70s), but I’ll bet he was younger than 40.

The first time he came, Wes just showed up on a bike, I think, and with a big smile, assuming that Merv would put him to work. It was a little while after Andy and I had started working. Merv put him to work, but Wes didn’t last as long as everyone else. He was fired the first time because he was taking two hour lunches and then clocking in eight hour days. He apologized and later talked Merv into letting him work again. He lasted a little while until I exposed him for doing jobs he wasn’t supposed to be doing, jobs that were easy ways to pass the day.

Merv just shook his head and admitted, “I don’t know about him. He’s no good.”

David was Merv’s main worker, and David went through bouts of alternating bitterness and thankfulness toward Merv. Some days it would be, “Merv’s a good man. He’s pulled me out of so many bad situations and gave me work and let me earn good money.” Other days would be full of cussing.

He rolled his own cigarettes. There would be a pouch of cheap tobacco in his pocket and a wad of papers as often as he had money. Every few weeks he would claim he was quitting, but he never did. He also claimed he never drank, but I remember him complaining about hangovers.

His teeth were as rotten as his stories about his divorce experiences. Sometimes he would laugh when talking about his past and sometimes he would be furious. He and I had a subtle feud over the radio—he wanted it on the hardest rock station and I wanted it on something easier to listen to. That lasted until I bought a small CD player and branched off with Andy and Ben to work as a different group.

David would laugh his hoarse laugh and smoke through his breaks, and we could hear him laughing anywhere on the site. He was always advocating Metallica and Pantera, and condemning whatever music anyone else was listening to, with few exceptions.

I worked with David and Marv on another job after the Bour house, tearing off a roof of an East Bakersfield house. On that hot roof David and I talked plenty about life and sundry issues, until he blew up at Merv over some little thing. Merv fired him or he quit on the spot—it wasn’t clear what happened. There was a lot of yelling. David fumed around, smoking like a steamboat, cussing all the words, and threw his shovel off of the roof. We used shovels to pry up the old shingles.

Then David decided to prove his value to Merv and began to work feverishly. He yelled at me, telling me that I needed to work like a man, but I kept on working like I had been—not wearing myself out, prying off the shingles steadily. There was an unspoken threat in this. He held his shovel up for a while as he screamed at me, and I didn’t even spare him a frightened face. I kept on prying up shingles.

After that, I gathered my wages and told Merv that I wouldn’t be able to come back to work for him as long as David was there. He understood.

The smoke still lingers after years. As it wafted through the window last night, I looked backwards in time and felt like I did back then: in the world, in the heat of the semiarid outskirts of town, and in the paths of different lives.

There is a house south of Bakersfield, California, and it is a work of art. Its art is not necessarily fine art or modern art, but it does have elements of both. The word eclectic pins this house almost perfectly.

There is modern art in the arrangement of antiques. There is fine art when music from long times past meanders or careens out of one of the many pianos inside.

The orange caboose in the front yard sets the mood immediately. A railroad crossing arm blocks the path from one side of the driveway to the other, its purpose less than enforcing. Railroad ties in the back yard define boundaries and build walls. There are remnants of the old Southern Pacific Railroad Company almost anywhere you can look here.

The roof and the DVD player are, perhaps, the newest things on this property. It was two years ago when my brothers, a friend, and I put the roof on in the alternating heat and rain, and that was when the sun burned the shape of an aardvark on my back (I thought I had the sunscreen equally applied). The sunburn stayed like that for months.

The rest of the artifacts out here might be worth millions, collectively. There are antiques and period pieces in every room—even the closets. Right now, lying on my stomach in the den, I can see a telegraph tapper, several early cameras, and an old-fashioned iron—without a cord. The crazy-quilts in the next room over where sewn by my great-great-grandmother, I think, and their theme is the same as the house’s: mix-match, hodge-podge, puzzle-fitting, eclectic, and every one of these terms in the most positive light possible. Each door you go through brings a new theme, a new atmosphere, and a new set of legends.

This old house used to be somewhere in the middle of Bakersfield, and it used to be half this size. This den I’m writing in used to be a back porch. There is a bathroom in the center of the floor-plan—but it used to have a window, I’m sure, when it was along the wall facing the back yard.

There used to be a pool behind the house, and a gazebo, too, next to it (where my parents were wed). I remember being taught how to swim in that pool (or, as I remember thinking then, how to drown in that pool). The pool was eventually filled in and turned into a garden, after I started remembering things distinctly. Eventually the concrete walk around the pool was broken up and hauled off, and the yard nearly entered normal-status. Surrounded by corn and cotton, the yard still was an oasis in the flat bed of the San Joaquin Valley, with its pines, walnut trees, Granny Smiths, and its willow.

The willow used to be a source of fantasy for me, because its mop of branches would become walls and inside was my haven. The whips, easily removed from the walls of my hideaway, helped me defend myself against the imaginary onslaughts of enemies. I don’t exactly recall when we cut the willow down.

I read The Chronicles of Narnia in one of the walnut trees—the one that’s still there now. The pines are still there, too, but they were always sort of boring because I couldn’t climb them.

My childhood here was my first stage of appreciation for this land. Though I would have then much rather preferred the city, where my friends with better Nintendos lived, and I would have rather taken a bike ride around the block over a walk through the fields of silage any day. Things are—no, everything is so different now.

Two summers ago my grandmother charged me to house-sit the priceless montage of history and American culture. Those two weeks as she enjoyed herself in Israel were some of the most crucial times of my life. The movement of crickets’ songs and frogs’ conversations outside, with the melody of Elliott Smith’s “Twilight” running through my short-term memory—all this defined a period of my life. They were the two weeks that I had to think in silence, absorb art and biblical wisdom, and develop my sense of the world. I wrote a song, and to this day I think it’s one of my best.

There was at least one night where I just sat on the ground behind the back fence, thinking and looking out over the fields, at the lights coming from the farm-houses a mile away.

I walked away from that house-sitting job a fledgling poet, and possibly a bit of a philosopher.

Late last year I returned yet another time on my weekly commute from Newhall to Bakersfield. Something had happened, and I wanted to investigate.

When I got there, I paced and crouched behind the back fence, visualizing the story I had heard.

I saw the tire tracks and guessed where exactly the spot was that the car got stuck in the mud. It was hard to tell. Tire tracks and footprints in the dried mud left no smooth ground in the first road between the back yard and the field.

I imagined the scene: a car stubbornly trudging through the mud until it slowed to a stop, the mud sapping the tread of traction, a man getting out of the car with a gun tucked in his belt, the gun falling out as the man started to panic and run, the man sprinting to the houses and trying to break in anywhere he could, the man heading next door to my great-grandparents’ house, getting in somehow, and trying to coax my Granny into giving him her car keys, the man grabbing the keys and running, driving away in the Buick.

The tire tracks awakened the P.I. inside of me. I hoped I could find a muddy outline of a Beretta somewhere as I paced with my eyes scrutinizing the ground.

But the police (or “the fuzz” as my inner detective called them) had done their jobs—they had caught the man, retrieved the gun from the neighbors down the street who had found it, found the Buick in central Bakersfield, and returned everything that was missing.

So I went and grabbed the secret key to let myself into the house (no one was at home), drank a glass of water from the faucet (from the well behind the South fence, and with plenty of minerals), locked the house back up, and drove off, resuming my weekend. I left behind the eclectic house, but only for a while. I keep going back, even if just to walk through all the doors.

Nothing is dearer to the heart of Americans than the happy ending. It is the supporting beam underneath the pier of our satisfaction.

Is this true? Or is it just a blanket statement made, like many Americans make, trying to sum up the world, like the average pop-country singer does by song titles (and, consequently, the line that is repeated too many times in the song)? We’re all trying to uncover that one thing that will make the hearer stop walking, look thoughtfully up at the sky, and let out a wistful and epic “Hmm” just in time to see the clouds uncover a picturesque rainbow. How crude. I declare war.

“Pardon me for being cynical, but I live in a sinful world,” said my history professor today, after giving a forty-five minute tirade on entertainment and its inverse relationship to thinking skills. There on the forefront of our video-game wars, there atop our patriotic concerts, and there saturating our DVD-case shrines hovers the happy ending with its shiny streamers and office-leftover confetti, the echoing foundation of satisfaction.

What percentage of the happy ending is made up of lies? The happy ending is so popular because of its displacement of the ending. Sure, if you re-label “the end” anything can have a happy ending, provided that thing has not been miserable its entire existence.

If marriage at the end of a Shakespearian comedy is seen as the ending, it would indeed be happy. If marriage is, more realistically, seen as a happy beginning, we are closer to reality (and that is a better place to be, no matter what any postmodernist says). Things don’t work out like the Mary Kate and Ashley movies. Everything in this life ends in death, even though there are plenty of happy events along the way for many, many people. But let’s remember that the only reason we know any of this is because we’ve heard or seen stories. The enemy here is not storytelling or happy endings themselves, but the opposite of thought.

The purpose of all this talk about happy endings is to point to the center of life, which is its purpose. Without a purpose, anyone would be an antihero. Superman does not save the world just because he feels like saving the world. Indiana Jones does not risk his life at the hands of the Nazis just because he’s tired of only being a professor of archaeology. But Jake Gittes has his life pulled out from under him because he’s going through it with this attitude: “I’m just the leper with the most fingers.” He does his matrimonial investigating because it’s something to do, not because he wants to rid the world of the evil of adultery.

If Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark had ended a few minutes before it did, the audience would leave with a despondent attitude. If Chinatown had ended a few minutes before it did, Evelyn and Catherine would have been getting away from Noah Cross, and Jake would have been a little sad, but probably content that he had done the right thing.

Aristotle’s definitions of the parts of the sequence of a story, though, make sense of this all. He advocated a beginning, middle and end in a story—but the thing is that the artist creates them all. There is no mandate for realism in a story—otherwise hardly any of them would have a happy ending. But there is no room for implausibility, either.

I won’t assert that this is a matter of life and death or even about danger (aside from the emotional kind). However, most depressing stories aren’t favorites of the majority of people, I’m sure. And all this may be enough to make someone throw up their hands and surrender, saying, “Why can’t I just have my happy ending? I want to walk out of the theater with a smile on my face!” That about sums it up.

When we live our lives in the theater by the means of the characters we see, we have no time to create our own character.

Charge me; I am guilty, but repentant.

Let’s try to achieve the better half of the distinction between well-versed and no-imagination. It’s the difference between a pier supported by concrete and a pier supported by hollow mahogany. Foundations aren’t supposed to echo when you tap on them.