Book and Music, By...

As I write this today I am listening to a collection of music that I own but haven't heard yet.  Every Tuesday I lengthen this listen:  my Starbucks Rewards app on my phone holds up a red-circled "1" like an auction bidder, and I go in to check the notification and find a free iTunes song waiting for my redeem, and every Tuesday iTunes itself features a free song for downloading from the home page.  The current playlist of new stuff looks like this:

• "Amsterdam" by Imagine Dragons
• "If Only" by Dave Matthews Band
• "My Dear" by Ruby Velle & The Soulphonics
• "How Do You Ruin Me?" by Black Prairie
• "Trouble" by Jose James

I don't know if any of these songs or the artists singing them are the latest "in" thing.  It's free music.  It's not likely I'll remember the songs or the artists in the morning.  Music is my one-night stand.  That explains why I probably knew who Amy Winehouse was but couldn't remember who she was when her death was announced.  Unless your name is Bruce Springsteen or Mary Chapin Carpenter, I probably love you, but not enough to marry your music.

It's free.  I'm no judge, going either way.

*****

I am reading a LOT of library books this year.  More than I ever have since I was a kid.  When I was a kid, all the way up to when my mother passed away, I hoarded books.  At one point in Missouri I had over 500 books, most of them literature (technically, I still have them--they're in storage in Missouri with a collection of other things), and I organized them by color.  I expected to live out my life in Missouri, even though my life of nomad behavior pointed to moving again at least once more in my life.  When my mother died, though, something no longer connected there.  I read books and donated them to the library.  I packed up the unread ones when I moved to California, and when I read most books in California I donated them to the library, sold them in my last weeks in San Francisco, or "set them free" through an application called BookCrossing.  I still considered books precious and requiring a physical care, but I could let them go when I read them, with few exceptions.

This year I've evolved again...books, through reading them, are starting to morph into the vehicles that I am sure they have been all along.  Don't get me wrong--I would not arbitrarily deface or destroy a book, but I am learning of ways where it is acceptable to do so:

• If you have decided to journey a substantial length of a mountain range on foot, and your backpack starts out too heavy; read Cheryl Strayed's "Wild" for particulars on burning your books along the trail for fire starters;
• If you want to write in a book but you don't want others reading what you have written, tuck your secrets in the negative spaces of others' books; read "The English Patient" by Michael Ondaatje;
• If you want to pack a fat novel that you've always wanted to read but it won't fit in your bicycle's handlebar pack, slice up the book and pack it in your backpack, deep in the gaps...but don't toss the wrong section; ask Willie Weir in his blog of his experience of reading "Atlas Shrugged" in cycling through South America.

Or just borrow a book from the library and return it after.  Whichever is lighter and fits the journey.  Borrowing a book from the library preserves it, yes, but...someday (I write this smacking my lips in some sort of lust) I want to be on a journey where a book becomes that one-night stand, that song that I remember but can't name, either by title or artist.

Onward, dear reader.

Flight Without Instrumentation

Yes, I'm grounded
Got my wings clipped
I'm surrounded
All this pavement
Guess I'll circle while I'm waiting for my fuse to dry...
Someday I'll fly, someday I'll soar... 
~ J. Mayer

Back in the States, when I had just moved from Ohio to Missouri, some friends of mine suggested that I read an author by the name of Richard Bach.  You might remember Bach from the book "Jonathan Livingston Seagull," but I was recommended Bach's "The Bridge Across Forever."  By association, I came across "Illusions:  The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah" at a bookstore in Manistee, Michigan on a vacation with my parents just a few months later.  I read "Illusions" in a day and reread it every year until 2004, when I came to California and the book went into storage in Missouri.  In the book Bach plays on his nomadic experience as a biplane barnstormer to describe a fictional account of meeting another barnstormer named Don in the "hills of Northeast Indiana" who wants to join Bach for a time on his travels.  Bach is uncomfortable with Don; Don performs little miracles like stopping a plane without enough runway distance, "lifting" the bugs off of the cloth body and visors in the cockpits so that the creatures can live again, and performing routine maintenance without ever greasing the engine.  Bach knows at some point this kind of behavior will produce a mob of followers (this was before Facebook and other social media, so think "followers" in a Biblical context), but Don insists that the powers he possesses can be attained by anyone.  I'll let you discover the ending, if you want it.
The book opens with an account of what kind of parable Don might tell if he were to relate a modern-day "Sermon on the Mount," and the story goes something like this:  there was once a creature that lived along the bottom of a fast-moving river.  The creatures could breathe underwater, but they struggled on the river-bottom all the same, getting beat by the current against the rocks.  One day one of them posed the question:  "What would happen if we just let go of the river-bottom?"
"Are you crazy?" asked another.  "You'll be smashed upon the rocks and die!"
The first creature wanted to take the chance anyway, and he released himself into the current.  At first he was dashed upon the rocks, and then he began to drift away from the rocks and rose up in the river, floating with the current, seeing amazing things, like other rivers...lakes...oceans.  The rocks occasionally bruised him when he came to new terrain, and yet, he knew they wouldn't end the adventure.  They were a part of the freedom for him.
I was thinking about that passage the other day when I caught AMC's airing of the 1997 movie "Contact."  In one scene Jodie Foster's character is questioning the building of a restrictive chair in the spacecraft, a chair that is not mentioned in the schematics that the "aliens" have transmitted to Earth.  Later, secured in the chair, she suffers all kinds of jarring and turbulence; it takes watching a piece of jewelry that she was wearing float in front of her to trust her instincts and leave the "safety" of the chair.  As she floats quietly in the cabin, the chair breaks away from the spacecraft and slams into the top of the cabin, where a moment more of thinking safely might have broken something on Foster.
Like, say, a hand or arm.
*****
Around the time I got the Bach recommendation I was friends with the first of two pilots in my life.  He was a student at the College of the Ozarks, studying airplane mechanics and working part-time at the same luggage store that I worked for in Branson, Missouri.  Occasionally, if the conditions were right, he would take me flying.  As I remember it the planes were mostly Cessnas; I trusted him enough not to get airsick.  Most of my motion sickness is psychological, so the trust part was crucial.
I don't remember if we ever flew completely without instrumentation--I remember taking sunset pictures and I remember a floating trick where he placed a hat on the dashboard (is it called a dashboard in a Cessna?) and then dropped the nose of the plane so that the hat "floated."  Lucky hat, I thought, laughing out loud, every time the pilot did that.  Lucky hat, to be set free from the rocky river bottom.
*****
"What do you need, Pete?"
"Glider practice."
~ "Always," 1989

Visibility.  Wikipedia calls it the most important aspect of flight.  Most of the time, flying, you're high enough to have visual perspective--if there's no cloud cover you can gauge the geography.  If there's cloud cover you can very often get above them and gauge the horizon and distance.
Over the weekend I read a fantastic short story by Colum McCann about early transcontinental flight pioneers.  McCann is well-versed in historical fiction; his novel "Let the Great World Spin" intricately covered the Twin Towers from their early days to their last ones, and he leaves no detail unturned with the story "TransAtlantic."  (You can look it up online for the April 16th issue, but if you aren't a subscriber you might do well to sit down with a copy at the library.)  In the story two friends fly from America to Ireland overnight in a modified Vickers Vimy.  At one point three failures occur:  the weather forecast (it was supposed to be clear), the exhaust manifold (a failure that creates a loud, steady white noise that threatens to put the aviators to sleep), and the electrical system (killing the heat and the instrument panel).  The pilot hesitates to drop below the clouds or try to climb above them; in the cloud cover, with no instruments, there is literally no way to determine which way is up.
With no perspective, would it be best to give up?  Should our heroes let go of the safety and just let the plane fall?  Or should they trust the thin air in front of them, and hope that somewhere, somehow, a horizon will emerge?  Let go, or go on?
Perhaps letting go is a form of going on.
*****
I can't stand to fly
I'm not that naive
I'm just out to find
The better part of me...
~ "Superman" Five For Fighting

I have no instruments for conventional flying.  I possess no pilot's license, for VFR, IMC, or otherwise.  I have been a passenger only all of my life, trusting the pilot.
Conversely, I have never spent significant amounts of time on an actual river-bottom, or in a spacecraft bound for a replication of Pensacola.  I do not possess those instruments, either.  I'll have to take the current for granted, or the dreams of Carl Sagan.
Still, I possess certain instruments that allow me to fly.  My little boat of thoughts floats in the vast ocean, my little glider of dreams graces the skies with instruments of vast and billowing communication.  I find possibility in job boards, publishers' Twitter accounts, and ties with friends following my plume.  I skim over nothing.  I have picked up every detail on my dashboard--dials and gauges called Monster, LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, email--for a year now.
Four months ago, all of the instruments worked.  My little glider may have been grounded, but I could still gain access to to the skies.
And then I moved to another land.  One after another, the instruments either failed forever or were disabled.  I had to grab the stick, stare at the cloud cover, and either let go or go on.  I picked up a pen, some paper--these are my throttle, steering.  I let go of the instruments that wouldn't work (strange freedom!), like rocks on the river-bottom, and held on to my little vessel with just a pen and paper.  I wrote my way out of the paper bag.  Back to square one...and sooner or later I spotted Ireland.  I landed without hitch.  Bless the person who repaired my little vessel, Lord, and here's the ground, and there's the plane, ready for me.

I'm on my way up again.

And the arms of the ocean are carrying me,
And all this devotion was rushing out of me...
Never let me go never let me go...
~ Florence + The Machine

That Song by Melissa Etheridge, or, Every Woman's Quest At Some Point

Take a good look at the woman in this picture. And take a look at the size of the meal she's about to eat.

This is typical fare for when I visit my family, either here in the Bay Area or in San Diego.

Take a look again at the woman. She's fat. Can't imagine why. Jeebus.

This is first time I've ever been fat and unemployed. When I first arrived in California I was woefully out of shape and my brother took me to Chinatown my second day here, and nearly gave me a heart attack on the uphill streets. I lived in Sunnyvale but traveled to San Francisco as much as I could and climbed all kinds of whacked-out streets--California, Telegraph, walking from Caltrain station to Golden Gate Bridge's cafe called the Warming Hut. I gave myself blisters on a weekly, sometimes daily basis. Then, after I lost my first job to downsizing, I found myself also with a broken heart at that time, and swam one to two times a day in Sunnyvale and took up running to avoid thinking about the asshole that walked away. I was in the best shape of my life. And the second time I was downsized I was already thin, so I just continued the quest--and the torch burning for the heartbreak.

When I started working at Grainger I spent those four years forgetting about the asshole and moved on to other assholes (all of which are happily out of my life at the moment), but I abused the crap out of my body due to lifting things without having help available. That didn't change until my last year there--where I was relieved of my physical tasks most readily under the leadership of the Airman--and, without a broken heart, with the physical break from breaking myself in half, I gained weight hand over fist.

Shortly after I quit I tried walks and runs to the ocean, frustrated by the fact that it took me the entire morning to work out. So then I started the hill next to my apartment, finding that I had to shower twice a day with that goal--seeming a waste of water. There are a million reasons not to climb that hill or go outdoors for a walk or climb a hill and then there's the pressing need to write at all times. So I'm a fat and somewhat happy writer, or I spend the whole damn day climbing hills. The other times that I've been unemployed I was not in the mindset to write, but now I'm not in the mindset to work out.

The thing is, though, it's now difficult to climb the hills I love. When I look at that picture, I don't see an ugly woman, by any means. My brother and I have this overwhelming programming that if you drop a severe amount of weight you must be sick--which is why when he came home to see my dropping of so much weight during that first heartbreak he took me to Thanksgiving in Yosemite and fed me Dramamine to give me an appetite. It worked. Now I eat anything and resent it, like Liz Gilbert's sidekick in Naples in "Eat Pray Love," and I don't want to have that relationship with food. When I look at that picture, I'm not blown away by the size of the meal in front of me--which I suppose is abnormal--but I look at the woman and say, "Well, no WONDER she's tired all of the time. No wonder she can't climb hills."

No, I'm not going on a diet. I know a lot of people would love that. I instead see that fat suit as possibility--I'm drawn back to the hills. So let's go back to climbing. My quest is to do as much climbing as I can. I'm taking it easy at first (after all, I have a summer cold today that makes everything seem more difficult), but my goal is to climb Telegraph more than once a week without gasping.

That's the next quest. Now that I've found my other mountain climber (Abbey). :)

Onward, dear reader.

P.S. - This song is the inspiration behind the title of today's post of Life For Rent. Sometimes even I know it's never enough.

*Photo courtesy of my sis-in-love's friend Nid, who joined us for breakfast. My dish that you see there is fried mush, or, if you're from anywhere other than the Midwest, fried polenta loaf. It was delicious. The restaurant is Hash House A Go Go in San Diego, and they also have a location in Las Vegas, which is where I first tasted fried chicken and waffles.