Writing

Armistice Day: Part Two

November 13, 2011 By cielosea 1 Comment

Part Two of Armistice Day reveals a boy who never wore the uniform and who fought his own war for too long…Armistice has been a long time in coming

I woke up in a red telephone booth. A guy name Tommy was kicking me and it hurt like hell. It was also light outside. Tommy, a Chinese guy who sold heroin and crack but only on the phone, apparently thought I was killing his business by passing out in his “office” – you fucking monkey junkie he kept saying. I couldn’t really argue, hell I couldn’t speak, for the blood and the ache behind my eyes.

I had no idea what had happened after I left the bar but I must have called Tommy and begged him for some dope. There might have been a woman involved. A redhead. Maybe not.

I stumbled down Commercial into a drizzle and a rolling sense of despair that yet again here I was, long past the best years, not yet at the end and still just wasting time looking for something that felt like peace but given my way of doing it, tieing off and blacking out, it was always a matter of taking out yet another mortgage on a barren nights sleep in a land where dreams died aborning and the rent was never was fully paid. I could always stay but I could never leave with the price of my seeking a hollow sound, a howling, in my head that gave me no peace at all.

Up ahead I saw obelisk and a bunch of old timers in full drag-no wait, they were in full uniform, blue and brown, watch caps and full dress, and red poppies in every lapel. Talking quietly they were somehow arranged in loose formation, flowers in hand, tears and laughter, an inevitable head count and younger generations in tow, some willingly, some less so, but all respectful enough on a lousy wet morning in november.

Armistice Day is what it was. I saw an old friend, a writer and his family. A guy whose father, a captain of a destroyer in The War who had recently died, and whose loss was both painful and a relief, was lost in thought as he stood holding hands with his daughter and his partner. He was a gentle, somewhat driven soul, a good friend to me until I stole his money and lied straight-faced too many times, a guy who was lost in how to help someone who said he knew the way home but was so clearly lost that there were no words left to describe it. Better to walk away. When he looked up and saw me he did just that as if death was palpable in the rain, in this place and no poppy or poetry would transform his pain into art or forgiveness at that moment.

I turned down the block towards my house, trying best I could to stand upright, to walk with purpose, to somehow honor the fallen, the memory of my father and his principles, my uncle and his horrors on Guadalcanal, my own dreams of combat heroism, and my own eventual refusal to fight in an unjust war, all of it a mess inside me. A roiling stew of loss and anger and dreams gone missing in rain soaked clouds, dope and whiskey, I recognized, maybe for the first time the principles of my childhood and ideas of standing tall had been sold for a twenty dollar rock and that since that day I was in search of my own peace, my own cease fire, an armistice of a very different sort, but a cessation of hostilities that might finally bring quiet to my nights and the possibility of an end to the destruction of my days.

I had been no warrior but it often seemed to me as if I had been with Odysseus, battered on the way home for a long long time. Emily from next door, was maybe 11 at the time. She came up to me as I walked up to my house, and smiled a hello, and told me there was no school that day. It was Armistice Day. She said she was going to get ice cream with her dad when he came back from work. What kind of ice cream did I want? I told her chocolate or coffee. She said she would remember and said thanks and went inside.

I fell asleep to sound of bugles far off playing Taps in the rain and children laughing in the park and when many hours later I was awakened by a knock on the door I realized I had been dreaming about chocolate ice cream in a sugar cone and a red haired girl with green eyes from a long time ago.

Photo Credits

All Photos courtesy of Author. ©Michael Lebowitz

Armistice Day: Part One

November 12, 2011 By cielosea 1 Comment

In Part One of Armisitce Day, Michael Lebowitz introduces us to a man who is waging a war against himself.

I went up to a bar named for a guy who was a barfly and a hell of a poet even if later on the know-it-alls in the college thought he was second rate or, as they put it even more pretentiously, if you can imagine, second tier. His kinda joint was a blood bucket, twenty four hours a day, sloppy, stinking, dried vomit and broken glass, cigarette smoke from before the war and broken dreams and lies that were both newer and older on a daily basis. The regulars just called it Swats, or for some of us, the “office.” In this iteration though, they made a hell of prix fixé a lamb skewer with cilantro dressing and rice pilaf, and a baklava with organic almonds for 17.95. Blood buckets just weren’t the same. The lies though, well, some things never change.

The new owner, an old friend from Mexico City told me how good I looked, how the writing must be going well since I looked like Keat’s ghost. I asked him how he knew Keat’s ghost. Told me he met him in Rome once and then we both laughed like the total assholes we were truly afraid we were. I told him that I hadn’t been around for a while ’cause the writing stunk but the cocaine was fresh out of Peru and Frida was rollin’ in family money. A perfect life, he said and ordered me a freebie draft with a Jack back. Truth was Frida was long gone and the only thing rollin’ in my place was a broken glass pipe and a whole mess of stolen rock. Put more traditionally, shit was rollin‘ downhill and truth to tell, there was not much left in the tank, nowhere left to run. Yeah, he said, you lookin’ good, that pipe diet is good for you and he went off to be the perfect host to someone with money in their pocket and a stock tip or two to sell.

It was open mike night and for what ever the reason I got called up. Hell I was dressed for it, scarred leather jacket, faded jeans, black tee shirt that had seen too many cocaine cinders, shades, bad hair and an attitude heading south on every draft. The bar was full, the local poets, writers, critics, love groupies and drug dealers all assembled for the weekly outpouring of trash occasionally highlighted by some truly awful but honest and embarrassing writing by some newbie who didn’t know any better. The real pro’s drank mint tea, because they couldn’t afford to blow the cover charge. What the hell, I had been all of them at one time or another, now, well who knew, I had a couple of rocks in my pocket, a pipe in my jacket, a mess of beer and whiskey in my gut and nothing left to lose on this night.

Your anger destroys me, (I intoned, flat, dead poet reading voice)
“When hope is gone the ultimate sanity is to grasp at straws.”
Rain water on window glass
has no meaning.
If you write it, has it happened twice?

Dead freakin’ silence in the room…I had heard myself speaking so I just assumed that I had nailed a universal truth in five lines and that gravity was suspended for the moment…crack and whiskey can have that effect, moments before they kill you or cause you to open your mouth call for 911. I followed up quickly with some Zen shit I made up on the spot:

Last week I did a three-hour meditation
on my past lives. (no laughin’ matter).
I remembered waving grass, rocks, wind.

Mountain fastness, frozen passes, river banks
red with sunset.
I am always not yet there.

The sun was gone when I wakened

to an uncertain night.
My guide asked me what I had learned.

I told her that in the beginning,
as in this fleeing moment,
We are here alone.
I stepped into the relentless now.

There was that dead silence thing again and then someone said, yeah man, very fuckin cool, relentless now, very fuckin’ cool!
I figured I was a hit. Or not a bust or something. Whatever it was it went downhill from there.

Photo Credits

All Photos courtesy of Author. ©Michael Lebowitz

Morning Song

October 20, 2011 By cielosea 12 Comments

She is not young anymore. One gets the impression that even when she was young she was not youthful, given to enthusiasm and giggling. The office politics of her place of work were more and more like her dining room table in her childhood home. There was yelling but far worse was the subterfuge, the jockeying for position, grant money and office windows, trips to Germany and other such – this was bloodsport and damn near killed her.

That morning she talked about how sometimes the thought of taking herself out came back to her. How odd, how final the phrase sounded coming from this quiet mouse of woman. She wasn’t built that way of course, she said. But she thought she understood it. There were scarves to knit and cakes to bake, everyone has something don’t they? Still, there is longing and fear, a bravado that belongs mostly to those who have fallen off the map. Her hands fly with surgical skill, the tapestries of her day emerge. She speaks slowly today, with what might even be amusement, at the thought of other people doing themselves in. As if. She asks one of the local musicians in the room if he has ever recorded an album he often jokes about, Songs to Hang Myself By. I’m working on it, he says, his voice getting lost in the uncomfortable laughter that starts and trails away. Almost as if it is only a matter of time, he seems to be saying.

This exchange came back to me earlier today when it became clear that it had been only a matter of time.

RIP JP Scofield

Photo Credits

Off The Tarmac – A Meditation After Shooting WIER, Waldo 100K and Pine2Palm100

September 24, 2011 By cielosea Leave a Comment

“The true martial arts teach non-resistance. The way of the trees bending in the wind. This attitude is far more important than physical technique. Never struggle with anyone or anything. When you’re pushed, pull; when you’re pulled, push. Find the natural course and bend with it. Join with nature’s power. Release attachment to outcomes. There is no “me” left to do it. In forgetting yourself, you become what you do. Your actions are free, spontaneous, without ambition, inhibition, or fear.” Anonymous

It’s in the eyes. What it is varies from runner to runner but make no mistake, it’s there, and every ultra runner has it. Distance. Stillness. Fear. Acceptance. Exhaustion. Joy. Time. I am photographer by choice and inclination, a writer by nature and a runner by something cellular that I have never truly understood. In none of these am I superb nor any better than generally competent but in all of them I have learned that showing up is most of the battle, if battle it is, and that doing what there is in front of you to be done that day, is the rest of it. I got involved recently in several ultra events as a photographer and while I can’t say that I have had epiphanies and revelations, I can tell you that not much about my working life has been the same since.

I responded to an off handed Facebook request for a photographer who might possibly be interested in thinking about talking about shooting an upcoming 100K in the Willamette Pass area outside of Eugene. My response was pretty direct, Hell yeah, sounds like artistic fun and some hard work, you can’t beat that…oh, and what about the money? (This is a paraphrase) Let’s have coffee and talk about it. So we did and so I did…find myself hiking into Pothole Meadows with too much weight around the middle and on my back. Shot some images, hiked back out went down the road over the hill, down the trail to the Lower Rosary Lake Creek and did it again. This was not your average photo shoot. More like a half marathon at elevation with weight training devices added in and the occasional photo op. One of my shooters told me later that he was worried that I might die. You and me both. The runners ran, the day went night, and the pictures caught some of it in a way that paid out the promise of the day in full measure.

Later on I thought about what had happened out there. I realized that it had begun in Idaho at the Wild Idaho Endurance Runs(WIER) on the first weekend in August. I had gone out to shoot it, not really having given it much thought…as in, it’s a race, I shoot races, simple enough and besides, I’m doing Craig’s thing later on, this will be good practice. It took a couple of hours of talking to the 100 milers to get that this was no simple deal I had signed up for, this was beyond anything I had seen up close, more akin to a loosely organized vision quest, a tribal understanding without the drumming and face painting, a calmness that did not quite hide the underlying urgency that each of the runners had that it was time, that the gate was open and that the “real” world was to be left behind, that all of the concerns of the day to day were secondary and that the next 24/36/48 hrs were theirs and theirs alone; theirs to go forth and find out who they were that day. I gave up my room at the inn down the road, slept in the front seat of my car if I slept at all, moved up the trails on foot and ATV and 38 hrs later was finished shooting my first 100 miler. It is odd that, in as much as the effort is singular, everyone there, and now this includes me, becomes part of that community, and what they do and what I do is forever and intangibly linked, their efforts and mine, nowhere equal but complementary nonetheless, are bound together and because we care about what they do the tribe is united, community made stronger, made whole, made invulnerable, infinite and universal, made entirely human. Said Dennis upon finishing 38 hours after he began, his body bent severely to the left, “No Michael, I’m not hurt. I’m just tired.” His smile broke through the dust and weariness like lightning in the summer sky.

Shooting ultra’s is physical. I put my sweat into the ground, my footprints into the trails, I wonder at the vista’s and seek the comfort of the shade, the warmth of the sun. I have gone out before the runners get there to set up. I have worked hard to be good enough to be asked to do this work, to share this quest. I appreciate their effort. I wait for them in silence, aware of memory, ancient forests, the wild mountain sage and thyme changes with the breeze. The runners’ footfall is signal, my response must equal theirs, attention must be paid in similar ways; to light, to footing, to timing, to breath. Breath in, exhale, find stillness, wait, shoot. “Hey man, good work.” me to them. “Hey man, thanks for being here”. As old and honorable as Bedouin in the sands, as traders on the Silk Road, as Comanche hunting parties heading south under a sliding moon, we are here with our sweat and our blood; our dreams and our very best work will meet in this one moment. We are one and then we move on, the story to be told later around the modern versions of campfires and oases. It becomes legend. I felt like I understood the insides of the hunters who returned to Lascaux and started painting on the wall even as they ate their kill. The story needed telling, the immediacy of it spoke of a belief in a future that was bound to the past and present, all time in the single moment. My job, I realized, is paint these stories on the wall. It takes everything I have on the day. And everything I have been. It has been a long time coming this work of mine, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Morning Wood

January 5, 2011 By cielosea 2 Comments

I lay back on the soiled sheets and rearranged the pillows. The pillowcases needed to be washed. The room was grey with careless use, our sweat still fresh and the sheets damp beneath me.

“Hey, man,” she said again, leaning back to stare at me with her dark brown eyes, eyes dark like her hair, wet and wild, eyes deep, masked, like the shaded trout pools on the North Bank.

“Yes,” I said into her silence, the silence of the not-still-young, a silence which ran like a river beneath the fast chat and the joke lines, the riffs of a private vernacular, a silence of frustration and anxious grief for nameless losses.

“Hey, man don’t be sad, okay? Older guys, afterwards, you know, they get down. I don’t like to see guys sad after we fuck. It makes me blue,” she said. She sounded lonesome, like November morning rain among the sycamores along the river.

“You don’t make me sad,” I said, not telling her that where she was is sometimes sadder than any middle age, that she made me feel old, older than the mountains, more ruined than the clear-cut sitting jagged on the sunburned slopes outside the windows; not saying that her life was full, and still in front of her, that the heartbreak and loss that was coming was like nothing she had ever seen, that her laughter and her stories of people I would never meet, never play cards with, released me from the dark tunnel of my own journey here but they also brought a boxcar of regret, a wind rent with lost voices and restless souls, all of it real for me in the hollow light of countless broken mornings.

“It’s been too nice a day to be blue,” I said.

“Great,” she said, sadly.

And if I could have done it I would have lifted her in my arms, she as light as a bundle of dried blackberries. I wanted to break the spell, to heave her into a creek somewhere, to shout and splash water happily, to find some quick irony with which to resist, to overcome.

She looked over at the clock, almost apologetically. It was almost always apologetically. When she turned back it took a second or two for her to be back in the room.

“You’re crying, you old goat,” she whispered sweetly, almost happy.

“Maybe I’m still high.”

“You’re not still high; you’re crying.”

“Maybe so, but I ain’t fuckin’ blue.”

Photo Credits

“Women and Sand” by Michael Lebowitz