A Thousand Channels, 24/7

On bright mornings, the traveler was caught off-guard by ghosts. Memories of the past washing ashore on the beach of his mind. It was the driving, really, that did it. The road stretched out before him full of promise. He would smile and choke down a few tears. The piquancy of his brother's ghost, the never-heard cries of his first born children, all gone except for that irreducible block of memory. Searing pain and ecstasy make a curious couple intertwined in the mind and heart. It was the road. The one that started a thousand miles away and led him into a sea of grass and remembrance.

"Did you see that?" (laughter)

"See what?" (Momentary befuddlement)

"That sign back there."

"Just now? No. What did it say?"

"Get this: MICHAELANGELO'S LIQUORS."

"Say whaaat?" (Giggling fit)

" I know, man! Who knew that he liked to get his drink on here?" (More laughter)

"Seriously, man, look how far he fell from the Sistine Chapel."

(Pensive silence)

Once more on the road, I have to do it, it's part of the job. I'm used to it now. Except for the run-down parts of town. Or towns, I should clarify. No, towns and cities. There is a lot of them out here and there are quite a few where it seems like the inhabitants have been ground down by life. Or the landlords were ground down. Or maybe everyone just stopped caring. Too many buildings possessed of gray dinginess, decrepitude and crappy signage. There is still cause for amusement, though. Passing through one such area, driving past Legs Party Bar ("Open 'til 2 AM!") I saw that the Knobtown Strip Center has added a new tenant. It's a "spa" offering"massage". I had to laugh. What, "Cheap Smokes and Liquor" from the joint next door aren't good enough?

A RECORD OF COMESTIBLES PURCHASED FOR THE MIDDAY REPAST

Dine In  9/23/2015  12:33:28 PM

Order # 132156  Cashier: Destiny M.

1 LG Steamer $8.49

 Mayo NO

1 Reg Combo  $2.59

 Medium Drink*

 Chip For Combo

Sub. Total:    $11.08

Tax:                 $1.04

Total:             $12.12

   Visa:            $12.12

   Change:       $0.00

The Kansas City Royals baseball team won their division this year. They will have home field advantage throughout the playoffs. Their first opponent is the scrappy Houston Astros, who made the playoffs for the first time since 2005. The inhabitants are looking forward to a great series, hopefully the Boys in Blue will get to go to the World Series again like they did last year. Everyone is talking about them and tuning in. One thing is for certain: the Royals seem easy to like, even if one is a fan of another team.

No matter how many times I have seen it in the course of my job, I still find it annoying that most people seem to think that tissue boxes with shiny colors or "art" on them are true interior decoration. They aren't, and never will be. The amount of time I waste in the course of a typical day hiding those boxes, so I can shoot a better picture, may not be huge on an individual basis, but it adds up. Every time I move one I think of French author Honoré de Balzac, who after a night of sex, allegedly lamented "There goes another novel!"

Did You Know? Collared lizards can run on their hind legs with a stride that reaches more than 3 times the length of their bodies.

Excerpt from the National Park Service's Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve webpage:

     Tallgrass prairie once covered 170 million acres of North America. Within a generation
     the vast majority was developed and plowed under. Today less than 4% remains, mostly
     here in the Kansas Flint Hills. The preserve protects a nationally significant remnant of           

     the once vast tallgrass prairie and its cultural resources. Here the tallgrass prairie takes     

     its last stand.

A Typical Day of Carnage -

 Raccoons: 5

 Opossums: 1

 Birds (species unknown): 3

 Squirrels: 8?

 Deer: 1

 Mouse: 1

It was the mouse that really threw me. To date I had never seen one in all my rounds. I nearly trampled it on my way back to  the car.

I-70 gets it start back east, and not very auspiciously. It begins in a Park-And-Ride in Baltimore, Maryland. It runs 2,151 miles to the west, passing though St. Louis, Kansas City and Denver until it peters out in an interchange with I-15 just outside Cove Fort, Utah. The distance from Cove Fort to Kansas City is 1,106 miles. The distance from Kansas City to Baltimore is 1,060 miles. It is a new life in the center.

I am home now. It was a busy day, lots of photos to be shot, lots of pavement to be traversed. I was able to drive with the windows down all day. No A/C. The rush of air through the cabin of my small SUV provides a white noise that allows me to follow my Zen. I think a lot while driving. Sometimes I talk to myself. Other times, especially on long drives away from the urban clutter, I stop and listen to the insects in the grass.

---

If anyone is perplexed by the passages above, you should know they are a tribute of sorts, my offering to a literary form previously unknown to me. The form is called biji, and it is of Chinese origin dating back to 220 AD, surviving up until about 1912 AD. I came across it in a fascinating book published by McSweeney's, titled "Vikings, Monks, Philosophers, Whores: Old Forms, Unearthed"*. I bought the book at a book store specializing in overstocks, trade-ins and other forms of second-hand volumes. Great buy, wonderful stuff. According to McSweeny's, biji can be translated as "notebook" and is characterized by "Musings, anecdotes, quotations, 'believe-it-or-not' fiction and social anthropology". They go on further to say that biji also can contain legends, scientific notes, and bits of local wisdom. Lists of interesting objects and travel narratives are also quite common. After reading the examples in the book (and being somewhat disturbed by the 'modern' take on it by Douglas Coupland) I was immediately smitten by the form and the idea. Anyone who has read my blog for any length of time can probably see why this is so. I think it is because biji finally, after all these years, puts a name to the things in my head.

*Vikings, Monks, Philosophers, Whores: Old Forms, Unearthed, as curated by Darren Franich and Graham Weatherly, 2009 by McSweeney's Quarterly Concern.

Discovering Light in the Flint Hills, with Ghosts (Sunday Meditation #29)

"What do you know of love?" whispered the voice in my head, ricocheting off the warp and weft of my mind to burst forth through my eyes and shatter on the back of my sunglasses. I was turning off the road, much to my relief. The arched gate of the cemetery beckoned, the orangey-tan dirt track leading me on. Beyond lay a sparse grove of monuments, blushed with moss and gleaming dull white in the soft sunlight of a Kansas spring. In a final burst of crunching gravel the car rolled to a stop. I briefly leaned my head on the steering wheel. I answered to no one present.

"I don't know."

I opened the door. The cool air of the Flint Hills rolled in to caress my face with feathery hands smelling faintly of stone, sod and ghosts. It was quiet out there, broken only by the subtle hissing of wind through the grass and a whirr of sparse traffic along the distant road. I stood up while taking a deep breath. My hand gripped the door frame. Thinking of love, or of what I did not know of it, made me dizzy.

Love slipped away from me again, a salmon evading the paws of a starving bear haunch deep in the stream. I thought I knew love but somewhere on this short road trip it came to me that it may be impossible to truly know something so much bigger than myself. So much more mysterious, arcane. Why this happened to me in broad daylight I cannot tell you. Perhaps the birds calling from the nearby trees knew the answer.

I asked them, nicely, and not too loud so as to avoid seeming rude. There was a burst of musical chatter, but nothing I could decipher. They gave me no counsel. The sun had moved a degree of arc, reminding of why I stopped here in the first place. I pulled my camera gear from the car and set off into the cemetery.

(It took little time to find a vantage point worth considering. There was a serendipitous line of sight threading through a cross, more markers, the cemetery gate, up a hill across the road and ending in a silo. I was surprised and delighted.)

The memorials were a curious mix from antique to new. Pillars, crosses, and slabs of marble and granite. In their own way all testaments to love. At least, I hoped it was love. I was seized by the notion that it would be tragic to carve all that stone for the sake of appearances.

I wondered, then, who would love me when I was gone. Who would care enough to erect a stele, provide a plaque and urn in honor of my memory. Staring past the large marble cross up to the silo on the far hill, a wan smile crept over my face. It did not quite reach my eyes. I wondered if pity made me feel this way.

(I set up the tripod with the pinhole camera secured to the top. My first go at it. This day would be full of accidents and revelations, I smiled to think.)

No, it was not pity. It was acknowledgement of a fact of my existence. Someone would almost certainly provide stones to ballast my remains, maybe even a cross. A Celtic one, I hope, or perhaps a megalith of bluestone with my name inscribed in Ogham runes.

"Do you think so, sir? Do you really believe that?" whispers again in my head. I looked up into the sky. I shook my head. "Yes." My voice sounded odd in the boneyard air. The funny thing was, I really did believe it. Perhaps for the first time in my life, certainly as an adult, I did.

(Advance the film. Check the level. Adjust the sighting. Open the shutter. Seven seconds. Good.)

Over a thousand miles and 47 years removed from the soil of my birth, I found myself standing in this alien graveyard with other old souls celebrating the knowledge that I would live as long as there were those who still remembered me. If I had thought to bring a flask, I would have raised a toast to our bones, mine clothed in flesh and those embraced by the sod around me.

(Advance the film. Check the level. Adjust the sighting after having nudged the tripod by accident, startled as I was by screech of what may have been a crow behind me. A lone truck downshifts over on the road, low growl bringing back memories of a long-ago road trip where I see the silhouette of my maternal grandmother against the side window. I wipe sudden moisture from the corner of my eye, and press the shutter release. Click like bones. Nine seconds. Click.)

Standing there waiting for the time to be up on the exposure, I decided that I did know something of love. Imperfect and incomplete, perhaps, but mine own knowledge. I know that I am loved. But the true test for me, the gauge and bellwether to guide me, is not so much the love I receive as it is the love I can give. This exhilarated and frightened me.

"How much can you give?" The voice, disguised as the murmur of wind-blown grass mixed with the songs of birds, asked me.

I let go of the shutter release. Images irreversibly burned into the film, to be taken on faith and unearthed later. The opening of that which seems tightly closed, to let in the light which provides form and depth to the shapeless darkness we far too often hold to close. We open, we illuminate, we develop.

We become, in the presence of light. We are formed, in light...in love.

"How much can I give?" I whispered to the bones and the prairie earth. A score of heartbeats passed. There was no answer, it seemed. I gathered my equipment and headed back to the car. The clunk of the door shutting nearly made me miss the reply when it came.

"More than you believe possible. Open your heart."

I gasped. That was it. I will open my heart, letting in others, forming myself in love. By such poetic measures we all become light. We all become love.